"Economic Assessment of IPM Programs"
Scott Swinton, Michigan State Univ.

Abstract :
Economic assessments of IPM are aimed at public program assessment; hence they focus on specific outcomes, rather than simply practice adoption. The first round of economic assessments of IPM programs were often as simple as partial budget profitability analyses. During the past two decades, huge strides have been made in incorporating environmental and health factors into economic analyses, either as trade-offs or as monetary valuations. Recent efforts have been made to incorporate such "non-market" values into aggregate welfare impact analyses. So far, these efforts have been restricted to well-defined practices on individual crops within individual states. Finding a cost-effective way to aggregate over the diverse fields of IPM implementation at a national scale remains a formidable challenge, even when restricted to traditional, pesticide-reliant, threshold-based IPM programs. As IPM programs move more toward biological controls and ecosystem management, new methods will be needed for economic assessment. In particular, bioeconomic and biophysical models will be needed to simulate interactions among climate, predators, parasitoids, pests, their hosts and valued products and services affected by pests in order to estimate how managed ecosystems evolve with and without IPM interventions.