Ict and ipm 1 Andrew Bartlett 2
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ICT and IPM1Andrew Bartlett2 Senior IPM Programme Development Officer The FAO Programme for Community IPM in Asia What’s this all about? Computers, the internet and digital media such as compact disks are transforming many aspects of life in Europe and North America. Agricultural extension is no exception. But does this technology have any relevance for IPM Programmes in Asia? Theoretically, the internet could be used to support decision-making by IPM farmers, as well as IPM training activities. There are a number of organizations who have started to make investments in these areas. There are reasons, however, to remain skeptical about the practical value of these activities. Most farmers in Asia do not have access to computers, and there is no obvious link between this technology and the experiential learning which has been promoted by FAO. Perhaps we will have to wait for the next generation of farmers, who will have used computers in school, to discover what they want to do with the internet… or whatever comes after it. ICT - what’s that? Information and Communication Technology, or ICT for short, is the amalgamation of information processing and telecommunications. ICT refers to systems for producing, storing, sending and retrieving digital files. These files can contain text, sounds and images, both still and moving. With suitable equipment, digital files can be stored indefinitely without any loss of quality, they can be reproduced at almost no cost, and they can be transmitted almost instantaneously over great distances. At the present time, ICT most commonly takes the physical form of a desk-top computer connected to the internet by means of a modem and a telephone line. Devices such as compact disk drives, digital cameras, scanners and colour printers can be connected to the computer to provide additional means for inputting and outputting of data. The rapid development of ICT makes it almost impossible to predict what form ICT will take in the future, but it seems likely that the recent development of mobile devices (e.g. internet phones and ‘portable digital assistants’ or PDAs) will be important. Milestones in the past development of ICT include the creation of ARPANET (a precursor to the internet) in 1969, the introduction of the IBM personal computer in 1981, and the launch of World Wide Web in 1991. The World Wide Web (WWW or ‘the Web’), is built on the idea that all files can be given an address, know as a ‘uniform resource locator’ or URL. These addresses, along with hypertext protocols (which allow links to be created between different URL’s) and software for browsing (which allows a person to navigate between hypertext documents) have created an enormous global information system. At the time of writing, the Web consists of more than 400 million internet users who have access to more than three billion files kept on more than 125 million computers3 What has ICT got to do with agriculture? Within the last ten years, computers and the internet have become ubiquitous in government offices, universities, development agencies and businesses around the world. Consequently, asking what ICT has got to do with agriculture is a bit like asking what the telephone has got to do with education, or what printing has got to do with primary health care. ICT is a means to many different ends. Computers help researchers to analyse data and write scientific papers; they help managers to prepare work plans and budgets; and they help trainers to produce curricula and handouts. The internet makes it possible to send these documents to other people as Email attachments; the documents could also be the subject of debate in an internet discussion group, and they could be placed on a website for public viewing. This is all very useful for the people with white coats or briefcases, but what about farmers? At this point we have to make distinction between countries like the USA, where 60% of the population are internet users, with countries like India, where the figure is half of one percent4. We must also note that computers are heavily concentrated in urban areas. New York has more internet host computers than all of Africa5. In the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Europe and Australia, the Internet is becoming an important source of information for farmers. The internet has a number of characteristics which make it highly suitable for this purpose: It is quick. The contents of a website can be revised far quicker than a printed booklet, and the delivery of the new content is immediate. It is persistent . The internet can be accessed at any time (compare this to fortnightly visits by extension agents). It is detailed. The vast scope of the internet makes it possible to find details which are relevant to the specific needs of individuals (compare this the simplified content of extension materials aimed at a large heterogeneous audience) It is open. There are very few controls on who can use the internet, both as senders or receivers. The internet doesn’t stop people from accessing information because of their sex, race, class or age. And although most agricultural information is produced by government or commercial organizations, websites can also be created by NGOs, producer associations, community groups and individual farmers. It is interactive. On-line discussion groups can be used to share experience, and some websites offer an ‘ask an expert’ service; the number of active participants in these forums can be far greater than – say - a radio programme. Does ICT have any particular relevance for IPM Programmes? IPM has frequently been described as a ‘knowledge intensive’ approach to farming, as opposed to ‘chemical intensive’. Information rather than pesticides is the key input for management practices at the farm level, and considerable expertise is required to collect and analyse relevant data. If farmers are to become experts, the field staff of government agencies and NGOs who advise and train farmers need more knowledge and skills than was required under earlier extension systems. With the above in mind, we can distinguish between two different uses of ICT in the context of IPM programmes. Firstly, ICT support for pest management decision making. Secondly, ICT support for IPM training. The former has greater current relevance in North America, Europe and Australia, where farmers are using computers, while the latter is more appropriate to the circumstances in developing countries. The use of ICT to support pest management decision-making has been summarized by Ian MacRae6, who has provided examples of websites which are sources of information for what he calls ‘steps in IPM’, i.e. Step 1 ‘Identifying the pest species, its damage and life history’ (websites with identification guides and pest factsheets) Step 2 ‘Establishing economic injury thresholds’ (websites with market news and agriculture statistics) Step 3 ‘Monitoring, scouting and predicting populations’ (websites which provide real-time pest maps, or modeling software, or weather information) Step 4 ‘Selecting and applying control techniques’ (websites with databases of chemicals and guides to natural enemies) Step 5 ‘Evaluating treatment effectiveness’ (no websites are suggested, MacRae notes ‘this is probably one of the most difficult and least addressed steps in IPM’) The potential use of ICT support for IPM training has been examined by Sithole, Gallagher and Taguchi in the context of an FAO-funded project7. The authors identify six ICT ‘mechanisms’ that could be used to improve the flow of information within the project, as follows:
Who are the major players? More than twenty years ago, FAO was an innovator in the use of ICT, having established the Global Plant & Pest Information Service in 1987. Tony Putter, the GPPIS Supervisor, described this as ‘the first interactive, multimedia compendium of plant protection information’. The GPPIS database has recently been incorporated into Ecoport at http://www.ecoport.org. Other relevant ICT efforts by FAO include:
In the United States, Ronald Stinner, Director of the Center for IPM at North Carolina University (CIPM at http://cipm.ncsu.edu/) has taken a leading role in the development of IPM websites and online databases. CIPM maintains sites for a number of other organizations and programmes, including:
Edward Radcliffe, at the University of Minnesota also needs to be mentioned for his pioneering work in making IPM reference materials available on-line. Radcliffe’s IPM World Textbook currently has more than 60 chapters available at http://ipmworld.umn.edu/. Internationally, the interest in using ICT to support IPM programmes has led to the establishment of the ‘IPM Information Partnership’. The partners who launched this initiative were:
Malcolm Isles of the Natural Resources Institute, UK, has described the purpose of Partnership: “The goal of the Partnership is to contribute to the progress of sustainable agricultural development and the pursuit of human well-being by making information related to the conduct of IPM more readily available to IPM practitioners working in the field of sustainable agricultural development”8. The first activity of the Partnership was a workshop in Nairobi which examined the needs and opportunities for IPM information in Eastern and Southern Africa. The workshop was hosted by ICIPE, which manages an ‘Insect Informatics Initiative’ led by Xunlong Xia, with funding from USAID. An outcome of the workshop was a new website managed by the ICIPE Initiative called Africa IPM Forum (http://informatics.icipe.org/IPMAfrica/) which includes a number of on-line discussion groups. Finally, in Australia, Geoff Norton has taken a somewhat different path as the Director of the Center for Pest Information Technology and Transfer (http://www.cpitt.uq.edu.au/). Rather than creating web-based services, CPITT is producing software packages which help farmers to diagnose and solve crop problems. The software is usually provided in the form of Compact Disks. What types of ICT services and products are available? It was noted above that ICT is a means to many different ends. Different groups of people require different types of information, and different mechanisms are used to get that information. A rough categorization is given below, with examples9. 1. Mailing lists: Email messages sent from a single source to multiple recipients are a cheap and quick way of distributing news. Currently there are no mailing lists specifically about IPM in Asia, but one list which is popular with IPM project staff around the world is the Pesticide Action Network Updates Service (PANUPS). Anybody can subscribe at this address: http://www.panna.org/panna/resources/panups.html. Another list for people who want to keep track of international meetings on the environment (including PIC, POPs and GMOs) is the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, produced by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (subscribe at http://www.iisd.ca/) 2 Bulletin boards Often called ‘discussion groups’, these are variants of the mailing list, which allow any member to send messages which are received by all other members . A number of academic and research-oriented groups exist. FPR-IPM is a discussion group run under the umbrella of the CGIAR System –Wide Initiative on IPM which links those with a special interest in using participatory research and learning methods to support IPM programmes (to join, write to a.braun@cgiar.org). The Rodent Pest Network is a bulletin board managed by CSIRO which allows members to share information about rats and other rodents (subscribe at http://www.dwe.csiro.au/research/progv/rodents/network.html). 3. On-line databases and libraries Websites have various degrees of specialization. Some are useful because they provide only one type of information, but a lot of it. EXTOXNET is a database of information about pesticides maintained by the University of California at http://ace.orst.edu/info/extoxnet/. The Food and Fertilizer Technology Center, funded by the Governments of Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan, has created a large on-line library of scientific papers focusing on agriculture in Asia (http://www.agnet.org/). The ASEAN IPM Knowledge Network is even more specialized, providing a on-line catalogue of documents dealing with IPM in Asia; the documents are not available on-line, but can be requested by members of the network (http://asean-ipm.searca.org/) 4. Web-based resource centres These websites integrate various types of information - news, training materials, directories of organizations and experts – but lack the depth of the on-line databases. The author of this article is webmaster of www.CommunityIPM.org which started as an activity of the FAO Programme for Community IPM in Asia. The site includes information about the FFS approach to IPM training in twelve countries. The Asia Office of the International Potato Center (CIP) also provides a range of information about activities in the Region, including scientific papers, training materials and contact addresses at http://www.eseap.cipotato.org. Perhaps the only example of a website at the national level which focuses on IPM is in China; the site, in both English and Chinese, is maintained by the Youth Committee of the China Society of Plant Protection at http://www.ipmchina.net/. 6. Organisational home pages Government Departments, NGOs and development projects often create websites which are on-line version of the organization brochure. These sites provide the organization with a presence and identity on the internet, but the information is rarely changed and has limited educational value. Examples include sites created by the Ministry of Agriculture in Malaysia (http://agrolink.moa.my/); the DANIDA project to Strengthen Plant Protection Services in Bangladesh (http://spps.hypermart.net/); and Thai Education, an NGO which has pioneered IPM activities in Asian schools (http://thai-ed.org/). 7. Training and reference materials on compact disk Although these materials are ‘off-line’ they deserve a mention because they have many of the benefits of digital media: large amounts of information can be stored in a small space, and different types of data (text, video, sounds) can be attractively integrated. Search and processing functions are usually quicker on a CD that on a web-based information system, but it is obviously more difficult to update the CD. ‘RiceIPM’ is a CD produced by the International Rice Research Institute, IRRI, in collaboration with CPITT; details are available at http://www.irri.org. IRRI produces a number of other CDs, such as a ‘Rice Nutrient Disorders and Nutrient Management’, and ‘The International Bibliography of Rice Research, 1951-2000’. CAB International, based in the UK, produce the Crop Protection Compendium (see http://pest.cabweb.org/cpc/cpchp.htm) 8. Distance-learning courses These courses can combine the benefits of CDs, websites, and Email. Distance learning for IPM is a recent development in Asia, with only one organization providing courses, namely the Asia Pacific Regional Technology Center (APRTC) which is sponsored by the pesticide industry. APRTC started running courses in Cotton IPM, Rice IPM and Vegetable IPM in 2001 (for details see http://www.aprtc.org/). Where is all this leading to? It is impossible to tell what role ICT will play in the future development of IPM. The examples that are given above indicate that there is considerable interest in this area, but there are a number of reasons to remain cautious. Below are some reflections on the factors which may influence future developments. A. The Digital Divide At the time of writing, ICT is almost completely irrelevant to farmers in Asia. It simply isn’t available to them. Lack of access to computers and the internet, the so-called digital divide, has become a big business for development organizations in recent years, spawning numerous reports10 and projects11. Without wanting to belittle these efforts, it must be noted that the fundamental issues are not different to those relating to other technology which affects people's ability to acquire information and communicate, including books, televisions, telephones, and even road transportation. The barriers to access are location, language and - above all else - poverty. Poor people, especially those who live in remote areas or who are members of a minority group, lack books and telephones not just computers. They need employment, education and health services, not just access to the internet. While it is worth asking if access to the internet will help to improve access to other services, in the same way that the construction of rural roads gives farmers better access to inputs and markets, we must not loose sight of the fact that ICT is an expensive and unproven means to meet those ends12. Strategies used to improve access to ICT are unlikely to be different from those for other technology. The main two alternatives to privately owned computers and internet accounts are:
There is a third possibility, which is group ownership. But given that there are not many telephone-user cooperatives, or community-managed trucks and buses, it seems unlikely that this approach will work for ICT. B. Information is not Knowledge Other chapters of this book have made it very clear that the IPM Field School is fundamentally different from earlier agricultural extension activities. The FFS utilizes experiential learning and action research. IPM trainers are not expected to tell farmers what to do, rather they facilitate a process during which farmers acquire their own knowledge. This knowledge is an outcome of analysis aimed at solving specific problems in a particular time and place. It is not obvious that ICT has a role to play in this process. Certainly the internet cannot deliver the type of knowledge which farmers acquire in a Farmers Field School. But could ICT provide farmers with new sources of information which will strengthen their ability to analyze problems? Weather forecasts, pest identification guides, market news – all of these could be useful, but it will be some years before they are available with the kind of specificity that Asian farmers need. Perhaps what would be more useful than websites and databases, are hand-held diagnostic devices, which provide data about soil and water quality, or about plant health, but – again - it will be some years before these are available. By looking back at what happened to strategic campaigns, rural radio and mobile film units (where are the chapters about these things?) we can identify two routes which might be taken with internet The extension route: development agencies could invest in setting up systems which attempt to tell farmers what to do with greater precision than in the past. We can image extension agents with laptops, fortnightly recommendations being sent to internet mailing lists, web-sites with ‘expert systems’ that will give advice based on data entered by farmers. This approach will, of course, cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Consulting companies will get rich and the systems won’t be sustainable. The education route: available services could be tapped to help people share information. We can imagine that the use of the internet by IPM farmers will vary from place to place, without any need to provide hardware specifically for this purpose. Discussion groups will be set-up by enthusiastic trainers, as an alternative to official mailing lists. Websites will provide case studies rather than expert systems. And a lot of people will manage without ICT and not get a poorer education because of it. Perhaps the key to the future use of ICT in support for IPM is not what the technology can do to people, but what people can do with the technology. If ICT is to be empowering, it must be farmers who decide the content, not just government agencies and pesticide companies. The internet must become truly interactive, rather than an efficient – but still top-down - way of delivering messages. We are a long way from that situation at present, but it is not an impossibility. Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the original software which allowed the World Wide Web to create itself, has this to say about interactivity: "The media may portray the web as a wonderful, interactive place where we have limitless choice because we don't have to take what the TV producer has decided we should see next. But my definition of interactive includes not just the ability to choose, but also the ability to create. We ought to be able not only to find any kind of document on the Web, but also to create any kind of document, easily. We should be able not only to follow links, but to create them - between all sorts of media. We should be able not only to interact with other people, but to create with other people. Intercreativity is the process of making things or solving problems together. If interactivity is not just sitting there passively in front of a display screen, then intercreativity is not just sitting there in front of something "interactive".15 3. The Truth is Out There…. Somewhere Earlier it was mentioned that the internet is ‘open’. Some people would prefer the word ‘anarchic’. They are worried that the content of web pages is not subject to the same kind of peer review that exists for papers which are published in scientific journals. They may have noticed the advertising banners flashing at them from what used to be independent resources like the WWW Virtual Library for Agriculture. And they may have discovered that searching for ‘Asian butterflies’ will lead them to pornographic photographs in addition to scholarly articles. Welcome to the 21st Century. All technology brings costs as well as benefits. ICT is no exception. It consumes vast amounts of precious resources (mainly our time) and it produces it’s own kind of pollution (junk Emails, or ‘spam’, being particularly obnoxious). But, like electric lights and the internal combustion engine, ICT will eventually arrive in every village in Asia, like it or not. We can’t avoid ICT; instead we need to find ways of making good use of it. In particular, we need to find new ways of dealing with issues such as authenticity, accuracy and bias. The issue of bias is important in the area of IPM and, more broadly, in sustainable agriculture. There are widely divergent views about problems, policies and technology. Each view has supporting data and cases… and it is all available on the internet. While this can be very frustrating, it also forces us to develop skills in critical thinking. We cannot take for granted that a particular viewpoint which in encountered on the Web is ‘the truth’. Instead we have to take account of the goals of the organization which has presented that viewpoint, we have to examine what evidence they have presented to support their viewpoint, and we have to compare this with alternate opinions. We must develop skills in using search engines, we should make a habit of clicking on those hyperlinks which provide information ‘about this site’, we may need to subscribe to five mailing lists rather than just one, and we certainly need to treat everything we read as information not knowledge. 4. It’s a generation thing The author of this article was born before the internet, the personal computer and the compact disk. His daughter has been using these things since the age of two; perhaps she should be writing this article. The current generation of school children will grow up with a very different perspective of ICT. Not just children in Europe and North America, but in many parts of Asia. With funding from the World Bank, the Government of Thailand is putting computers into classrooms across the country. The ADB is supporting similar efforts in Pakistan. Although there are some dissenting voices, people who believe that “a good school needs no computers, and a bad school won’t be improved by even the fastest Internet links”16, projects of this kind are attractive to many donors, recipient governments, and the private sector. In 10 years time, computers and the internet will not be a new technology, they will simply be part of the environment in which people live and work. The technological environment will help shape the skills and values of the next generation; IPM, along with every other human endeavor, will be dealt with in the context of those values and skills. We do not know how values will change as a result of the spread of ICT, but some of the speculation is consistent with the empowerment goals of IPM programmes. Don Tapscott, for example, writes of interactive democracy and the transformation of institutions17. Consequently, while the costs and rapid redundancy of computer hardware, and the glossy superficiality of many websites, seem to make ICT the antithesis of action research in a rice field, the farmers of tomorrow may find uses for it which we cannot begin to anticipate. 5. Useful? Are you sure? The hype regarding the internet has – in the last five years - produced a massive growth in commercial sites, many of which have already gone bankrupt. Websites and internet services run by government agencies and development programmes, however, do not stop functioning just because nobody is using them, or because they are not producing a certain level of benefits. The mere existence of websites such as those mentioned earlier in this article provides no assurance that they are useful (but the number of dead links and redundant pages suggests that ICT, like other technologies, often attracts more money for creating assets than it does for maintaining them). So, how can we evaluate the usefulness of ICT in the area of IPM? And if we can’t do it now (and don’t need to, since we know that Asian farmers aren’t using it) could it be done in the future? We can start by reflecting on the fact that agricultural researchers across the world are using ICT on a daily basis despite the fact that the scientific examination of this phenomenon is almost entirely lacking. This situation may be due, of course, to the speed at which ICT has developed, but it does give rise to the interesting thought that some techniques don’t need to be justified by sample surveys, academic papers, and conferences before they become widely adopted. We must also note that a framework for examining this phenomena is lacking. Thousands of books have been written about development communication, agricultural extension, and adult education with almost no reference to the use of ICT. The key works in the literature of diffusion theory and the adoption process, which dominated thinking on agricultural extension for thirty years, were written before the introduction of personal computers. Even recent work on Ecological Knowledge Systems entirely overlooks the role that might be played by the internet18. We can finish by repeating something which was mentioned earlier: ICT is a means to many different ends. This puts it in a similar position to IPM. There is some controversy about how to evaluate IPM programmes because they have multiple objectives and some of the social benefits are very difficult to measure. If we add ICT to the equation - as something which might support the achievement of some IPM objectives and not others, while also generating a range of extraneous benefits, and bringing with it cost factors such as cultural erosion and loss of personal time - we have a task which will probably keep PhD students busy for at least a decade. ConclusionsRight now… there aren’t any. APB
28 Jan 2002 1 This paper was written as part of the forthcoming book Farmers, FAO and Field Schools: Bringing IPM to the grass roots in Asia. The book will be published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation in 2002. 2 The author can be contacted at webmaster@thefieldalliance.net 3 Web statistics at January 2001 from various on-line sources, including the Internet Software Consortium (www.ics.org), Cyberatlas (www.cyberatlas.internet.com) and Google (www.google.com). 4 Cyberatlas, 17 Jan, 2002 “The world’s online populations” (www.cyberatlas.internet.com) 5 Reuters, 18 Jul 2001, “World leaders take a fresh look at digital divide” (www.itmatters.com.ph/news/news_07192001b.html) 6 MacRae, I.V. “IPM Resources on the World Wide Web” (http://ipmworld.umn.edu/chapters/Macrae.htm) 7 Sithole, S.Z., Gallagher, K.D. and Taguchi, M. “Information Needs on Integrated Production and Pest Management Programs”, Proceedings of the Integrated Pest Management Communications Workshop: Eastern/Southern Africa, ICIPE, 1998 (http://www.ag.vt.edu/ail/ipmcw/proceedings/proceed.htm) 8 Isles, M. “IPM Focus Information Partnership”, Proceedings of the Integrated Pest Management Communications Workshop: Eastern/Southern Africa, ICIPE, 1998 (http://www.ag.vt.edu/ail/ipmcw/proceedings/proceed.htm) 9 The author apologizes for focusing on examples in the English language. Where possible he has identified examples from Asia, but – it has to be admitted – the region has very few ICT resources in the agriculture sector at the present time. 10 See, for example, UNDP’s Human Development Report 2001 "Making New Technologies Work For Human Development” Also, “Creating a Development Dynamic: Final Report of the Digital Opportunity Initiative”, 2001, on-line at http://www.opt-init.org/framework/pages/contents.html 11 Two relevant programmes in Asia are The Pan-Asia Networking Programme funded by IDRC (http://www.panasia.org.sg/), and the Asia Pacific Development Information Programme funded by UNDP (http://www.apdip.net/) 12 “I am suggesting that if somebody is interested in equity that you wouldn't spend more than 20 percent of your time talking about access to computers, that you'd get back to literacy and health and things like that”. Bill Gates talking at the Digital Dividends Conference in Seattle, October 2000. The full text of this interesting session can be read at: http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2000/10-18digitaldividends.asp 13 The project, which involves 12 villages in Pondicherry, is described in ‘The internet comes to Rural India’ by Keane Shore. This article, and reports of similar projects in other countries, is available at http://www.idrc.ca/reports 14 There are an estimated 500 ‘warnets’ in Indonesia at the time of writing, with the number growing rapidly (see http://www13.brinkster.com/warnet2000/startup.htm) 15 Tim Berners-Lee, 2000, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Harper Collins 16 Clifford Stoll, 2000, High-Tech Heretic: reflections of a computer contrarian, Anchor Books 17 Don Tapscott, 1998, Growing up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, McGraw Hill 18 Roling, N.G. and Wagemakers, M.A.E. 1998, “Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture: Participatory learning and adaptive management in times of environmental uncertainty”, Cambridge. This book of 300 pages, with cases from Europe, USA, Australia and Asia, includes one passing reference to computers, and no mention of the internet. Directory: library -> documents documents -> Like print sources, information obtained through an electronic resource must be documented. The documents -> Student Library User Group documents -> What’s New in the National Police Library documents -> Performances: Flagrant Wisdom documents -> Royal holloway university of london documents -> Josette Urso grants and residencies documents -> Bibliography film documentaries documents -> Information Sources Guide: Electronics and Electrical Engineering documents -> Full mhra referencing Handbook Contents Part 1: The Basics of Referencing documents -> Human factors concerns in uav flight Download 57.11 Kb. Share with your friends:
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