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Abstract

This paper attempts to shed some light on current biopolitics of food and environmental security by analyzing the strategy of Integrated pest management (IPM). IPM is an ecological form of pest management that emerged in the United States in the 1950s in response to the pesticide crisis and now informs numerous pesticide legislations around the world. The paper analyzes IPM as a governmental hinge that aims to reconcile the conflicting goals of food security and environmental security. To this end, the paper makes three intertwined arguments. First, through an examination of scientific texts from the field of economic entomology, the paper shows how biological and chemical pest control methods are produced as two conflicting materialities that must be mediated. In a second step, the text shows how economically defined thresholds and cost-benefit analyzes are used to level the difference between these two materialities and make them commensurable. Finally, it elaborates how IPM aims primarily at transforming farmers’ practices. The use of chemicals in agriculture is to be reduced by transforming farmers into calculating subjects. Overall, the article aims to show how IPM, as an important element of contemporary ecological governmentality, seeks to realize positive environmental effects in the quantitative medium of economics and science.

Keywords

Biopolitics food security environmental security pest management anthropocene calculation

Introduction

The question of how modern agriculture can respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene is at the center of the current global scientific and political debates on environmental and food security. Events such as the food price crisis in 2008 and the increasingly visible impact of the unfolding ecological crisis have revived concerns among policy makers about a shortcoming of global food production (Bernard de Raymond and Goulet, 2020). As the world population is projected to increase to a total amount of 10 billion people in the next few years and the effects of the unfolding ecological crisis threaten to undermine the socio-material conditions for food production (FAO, 2017b), policy makers and scientists work on agricultural strategies and technologies that are able to tackle this twofold challenge. In this context, established forms of pest control have also become the focus of critical reflection. For more than 100 years, the use of chemical pesticides has been part of the established repertoire of modern agriculture and has been one of the core preconditions for the immense increases in productivity that have been achieved in agriculture in recent decades. At the same time, the ecological side effects of chemical pest control have been increasingly coming to the fore again in recent decades. The loss of global biodiversity, the decline in insect populations, and ongoing soil degradation have been associated with the excessive use of chemicals in agriculture, indicating that modernity with its peculiar industrial and intensive practices of food production has turned into “a theme and problem for itself” (Beck, 1992: 8; see also Collier and Lakoff, 2015).

In order to counteract the ecological side effects of high pesticide use, scientists, policy-makers and international organizations have put forward a new strategy of pest control—Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Originated in the U.S. in the 1950s as an immediate response to the DDT insecticide crisis, IPM has slowly developed into the “worlds leading strategy” (FAO, 2011: 68) for plant protection which today informs a wide array of national and international plant protection legislations and development policies (BMEL, 2013; EU, 2009; FAO, 2015, 2017a; USDA, 2018). IPM is an ecological management strategy primarliy used in agriculture and forestry, but also be found in facility management or malaria control (see Shaw et al., 2010: 377). It is an eco-holistic approach to pest control that aims to largely avoid synthetic insecticides and instead mobilize biological and cultural means for fighting insects. More describing a rationality or “philosophy” (Flint and Van den Bosch, 2012; Perkins, 1982: 61) rather than a particular way of fighting pests, IPM programs usually involve a variety of tactics such as harnessing natural host-predator relationships, the targeted release of predators in the agro-ecosystem, setting up pheromone traps for catching unwanted insects, the rotation of crops, or the application of biological insecticides. Chemical insecticides, on the other hand, are not banned in the IPM cosmos, but are used as a last resort to tackle exceptional high rates of pest infestation. Economic concepts such as cost-benefit analyzes and damage thresholds are supposed to ensure that farmers use chemical pesticides in exceptional cases and on the basis of scientific and expert knowledge.

In recent years, the emerging transformation of biopolitics caused by the Anthropocene has increasingly become the subject of social science reflection. Scholars from various disciplines have observed that nature and environmental problems become increasingly objects for political intervention and change the character of biopolitics, governmentality and the politics of security (Baldwin, 2013; Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016; Dalby, 2017; Delanty and Mota, 2017; Folkers, 2017; Grove, 2010; Lorimer, 2017; Luke, 1995; Rutherford, 2007). At the same time, a number of papers have made the scientific and political management of chemicals the subject of investigation (Guthman, 2017; Guthman and Brown, 2016; Jasanoff, 1995; Mansfield, 2021; Werner et al., 2021). They have not only shown which techniques are used in modern agriculture to try to contain and regulate the effects of insecticides. They have also opened up theoretical and methodological avenues for looking at the various “chemosocialities” (Kirksey, 2020) and “chemical geographies” (Barry, 2017; Romero et al., 2017) that have emerged in the modern world.

In this article I aim to contribute to this lively debate on ecological forms of biopolitics and chemopolitics, by unpacking the rationality and techniques of a crucial strategy in contemporary agricultural pest management. I analyze the strategy of IPM as a governmental hinge that aims to reconcile the conflicting goals of the “biopolitics of food provisioning” (Nally, 2011) and the “biopolitics of environmental security” (Grove, 2010). While chemical forms of pest control appear indispensable from a global food security point of view, they prove highly problematic from an environmental security perspective as they cause massive side effects. IPM promises to resolve this tension by rendering chemical and biological control methods integrable. I will demonstrate, how the definition of economic thresholds and the application of cost-benefit analyzes allows the material differences of chemical and biological pest control practices to be translated into a metric of damage values, making them commensurable and calculable. These calculative techniques do not only ensure that chemical pest control methods can be applied without unleashing their devastating side effects. Moreover, they are the prerequisite for changing the practice of farmers. The economic thresholds are designed to encourage farmers to stop using chemical pesticides intuitively and instead apply them according to objective measures. Overall, the main goal of my article is to show how technologies of “quantification” and “commensuration” (Brighenti, 2018; Espeland and Stevens, 1998) inform current strategies of food and environmental security. It demonstrates how contemporary forms of ecological governmentality are realized in the “quantum media” (Wernimont, 2019) of techno-science.

To unfold my argument, I proceed in three steps. In the first section I unpack the peculiar material politics underlying IPM. Drawing on a close reading of key publications in the scientific field of economic entomology from the 1940s to the 1960s, I show how the chemical and the biological are brought forth as two conflicting yet complementary materialities. While the biological forms of pest control inherent to ecosystems are conceptualized as the “natural way” of dealing with harmful insects, chemical pesticides are envisioned as a kind of “dangerous supplement” (Derrida, 1997) that add necessary control mechanisms that nature itself cannot provide. In the second section, I focus on the central theoretical concept that underlies almost all IPM variants today—the economic threshold. Extending my reading of entomologic literature and drawing on insights from the fields of valuation studies, science and technology studies, and sociology of quantification, I analyze the economic threshold as a calculative tool aiming to integrate biological and chemical control methods by relating both to a common measure of economic loss. In the third part, I will show how the IPM strategy transforms global environmental problems and the material risks of chemicals into a problem of individual choices. From an IPM perspective, the ecological problem is not solely the toxicity of chemicals, but primarily the uninformed choices of farmers. In other words, IPM introduces a specific “regime of subjectification” (Bröckling, 2015: 6). Farmers are addressed as poorly educated subjects who need to be trained to become good ecosystem managers.

Rationality and material politics of IPM

The emergence of IPM is historically linked to the increasing problematization of chemical pest control methods between the 1940s and 1960s, which observers retrospectively refer to as “dark ages of pest control” (Kogan, 1998: 244). At that time, the newly introduced insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT, sparked a major expansion in the use of chemical pesticides. The high effectiveness of DDT in fighting even the most stubborn pests gave many experts the impression that the proverbial magic bullet had been found against one of the most serious problems in agriculture (see Mitchell, 2002). However, DDT turned out to be a widespread poison which made no distinction between pest and beneficial insect and even found its way into the bodies of humans via ecological and metabolic cycles. Of course, the story of DDT is now well known. In particular, the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring (2002) brought the issue of chemical pesticides to the attention of a broad public, thereby also marking the take-off for the emergence of the environmental movement of the 1960s. However, in order to decipher the specific forms of knowledge and rationalities of IPM, it is necessary to retrace these well-trodden paths, as they are the site of an important scientific debate about the future of chemical pest control. Of particular note in this context are the contributions of a group of California economic entomologists in the 1950s and 1960s who sharply criticized the overuse of pesticides and called for more sustainable forms of pest management. In particular, an article titled The Integrated Control Concept (Stern et al., 1959) had a profound influence on contemporary IPM practices, introducing into the discussion a set of ideas and concepts that promised to bridge the divide between conservation and pest management (Bottrell and Schoenly, 2018; Kogan, 1998; Pedigo et al., 1986; Peterson et al., 2018). Consequently, contemporary economic entomologists refer to The Integrated Control Concept as “the single most important paper published on crop protection in this [sic!] century” (Warnert, 2009). Thus, I will focus on the publications of this research group because they are key texts of contemporary forms of pest management.

The starting point for the Californian entomologists’ reflections on pest management was a new understanding of the relationship between humans and agriculture. Drawing on the concept of ecosystems, they argued that any form of future pest management has to recognize the fact that

“populations of plants and animals (including man) and the nonliving environment together make up an integrated unit, the ecosystem. If an attempt is made to reduce the population level of one kind of animal (for example, a pest insect) by chemical treatment, modification of cultural practices, or by other means, other parts of the ecosystem will be affected as well.” (Stern et al., 1959: 94, see also Smith and Allen, 1954: 38)

From the entomologist's point of view, humans and fields, farming communities and agroecosystems, culture and nature cannot be considered as separate entities, but form a complex web of relationships in which there are constitutive dependencies and constant interactions between organic and inorganic elements (see also Kogan, 1998: 250). This also applies to the status of pests, which can now no longer be treated in isolation, but must always be understood as pests in an environment. Any intervention in pest population now inevitably affects other elements of the ecosystem and may result in unintended side effects. The deliberate use of DDT greatly demonstrated this interconnectedness. While improving yields and food security, they raised a significant number of unforeseen problems, such as chemical residues on food, health problems for pesticide users, resistance to insecticides, and secondary outbreaks of pest populations (Stern et al., 1959: 83–84). Therefore, new strategies of pest control were desperately needed, that took these inherent dependencies into account. Chemical pest control was no longer to be “imposed” on the ecosystem, but rather “fitted” into it (ibid.: 94). But why, one might ask, should one still resort to chemical insecticides at all? If they have serious side effects for humans and non-humans alike, why not dispense and replace them with biological forms of pest control? Why this will to integrate?

To understand this argument, it is useful to consider the concrete ecological imagination of agroecosystems that underlay the entomologists’ thinking. From the entomologists’ perspective, an agroecosystem cannot be equated with other ecosystems. Rather, agroecosystems (especially modern monocultures) are highly artificial ecosystems whose operations and functions are designed to meet human needs. Accordingly, the stability and continuity of these agroecosystems depend on ongoing human intervention. The biological control mechanisms inherent in “natural” ecosystems, only work to a limited extent in an agro-ecosystem, as these create particularly favorable living conditions for certain insects and throw host-predator relationships out of balance. Each monoculture is characterized by a complementary antagonist that finds perfect living conditions in the artificially created ecosystem. Therefore, chemical control methods are necessary because provide a set of material properties of pest control that are not present in agroecosystems. At least four differences can be distinguished.

First, there is the difference in temporality. Chemical control methods are characterized by a low latency period, i.e. their effect appears immediately after application. However, this immediacy also means that the effect achieved can never be a lasting one: “chemical controls involve only immediate and temporary decimation of localized populations and do not contribute to permanent density regulation” (Stern et al., 1959: 87, see also Beirne, 1962: 189). As soon as the application of chemical methods is stopped, pest populations settle back to their old levels. They are “short-term, restricted pressures” which is why they “must be added to the environment at varying intervals of time.” (Stern et al., 1959: 89) In contrast, biological forms of control, such as the harnessing of natural parasite-host relationships, act much more slowly and less intensively than their chemical counterparts. However, their effect is of longer duration: “[T]he important prevailing characteristic of biological control is one of permanent population-density regulation” (ibid.: 88). The inherent biological regulation mechanisms are mechanisms that do not have to be stimulated from the outside (although this is of course possible), but are inherent the agroecosystem. Agroecosystem manages plant-insect relations by immanent regulatory mechanisms that follow their own temporality, their own rhythm. Of course, there are also spontaneous events in the world of biology, such as sudden increase in population density due to unusual weather events or other environmental changes. Still, the basic temporality of the biological control mechanisms is one of duration that keeps the agroecosystem in balance and thus acts preventively against high insect populations.

The second difference could be described as the normativity of pest control. Chemical control methods are based on economic expectations of productivity and abstract norms applied to the ecosystem by modern societies. Just as synthetic fertilizers, chemical insecticides are an inscription of “modernist values of acceleration and efficiency” (Gan, 2017: 64). They are tools that help adapt the services of agroecosystems to the needs of a capitalist society, calculating “the right mix at the right time for the right population” (ibid.: 67). In other words, chemical control methods are grounded in a transcendental norm that is imposed on the agroecosystem. In contrast, biological pest control is more oriented towards what Georges Canguilhem (1989) called the “normativity of life”. The agroecosystem constitutes a set of self-regulatory mechanisms which “govern” and stabilize certain living conditions for a number of organisms: “Biological controls are part of natural control which governs the population density of pest species” (Stern et al., 1959: 87). This includes the introduction of new biological organisms into an agroecosystem, such as the periodic release of natural predators, which entomologists advocated. Here the goal is to harness the immanent norms of life for the control of insects. Against this background, the chemical control method appears to be a kind of exceptional measure, which is only to be used if one has to deal with “life-out-of-bounds” (Clark, 2013). So, while the biological strategy tries to make use of the “biotic mortality agent” (Van den Bosch and Stern, 1962: 369) or the “necrological vitalism” (Thacker, 2010: 26) of life itself, the chemical strategy aims to insert a little more synthetic death into the system whenever there is too much life.

Thirdly, there is the difference in spatiality. Biological governing mechanisms act over a large area. In fact, they are the area that “governs” itself. The boundaries of the agroecosystem coincide with the boundaries of biological governing mechanisms, so there is no place in the system without biological control mechanisms at work. Ultimately, the control mechanisms have a tendency to expand, because they consist of “living organisms and thus can seek, find, and attack the pests, and can be self-perpetuating and can multiply and spread” (Beirne, 1962: 189). In contrast, chemical control methods work “on a local basis” (ibid.), which means that they are effective only at the specific site of application. Against the background of the unfolding ecological crisis, this designation of pesticides as “local” seems puzzling at first. For example, one might ask how the spatially transversal ecological and toxicological side effects can be explained if pesticides only act at the site of their application? In fact, this problem was also seen by economic entomologists. For them, however, the spatial transgression of pesticides was not necessarily an effect of chemical pesticides as a whole. Rather, it were specific, outdated pesticides that did not act locally enough. They therefore advocated for an improvement of toxicological “selectivity” (Van den Bosch and Stern, 1962) of future insecticides. New insecticides are supposed to be designed in such a way that they discriminate more strongly between friend and foe and only attack certain pests. So even if the spatial effect of the chemical control methods could not always be controlled: the ideal was one of targeted application.¹

Fourth, both methods show a very different degree of contingency and thus reliability. Despite their regularity and permanence, biological control mechanisms are highly contingent and unreliable forms of pest control. Unforeseen transformations in nature can always lead to changes in the conditions of the ecological system which, of course, interferes with capitalist structures based on regular and plannable yields: “A species population is plastic and is undergoing constant change within the limits imposed upon it by its genetic constitution and the characteristics of its environment” (Stern et al., 1959: 89). The result can be a sharp increase in the population of insects, which can no longer be contained by natural parasite-host relationships (ibid.: 95). On the other hand, the effect of chemical methods is characterized by a lower degree of contingency: “chemical agents … tend to be more immediately effective in destroying pests, and there is greater certainty of pest mortality from their use” (Beirne, 1962: 90). The effects of chemical control are not only immediate but also reliable. They thus resemble the modern framing of agroecosystems as well-oiled, reliable machines, that can be disassembled and reassembled at will (Perkins, 1982: 272). However, this low degree of contingency can only be maintained if the use of chemical agents remains the exception. If they are used in a regularly manner, they do not only destroy the natural control mechanisms, but generate new contingencies, such as resistant pests (Stern et al., 1959: 81ff.).

As this brief comparison summarized in Table 1 shows, for California entomologists, chemical and biological control methods are considered as two distinct and conflicting entities. Each is characterized by a set of advantages and disadvantages that are both complementary and mutually exclusive, making both the use of one strategy alone or its simultaneous use impossible. Because pesticide-based pest control has significant side effects and can even destroy natural forms of pest control, the activation of the immanent control mechanisms is always the preferred strategy. However, the biological mechanisms are not sufficient. Since from an entomological point of view agroecosystems are not natural systems but highly artificial “agricultural factories” (Smith and Hagen, 1959: 1106, see also Stern et al., 1959) designed to provide humans with food and fiber, it cannot be assumed that they will provide the necessary regulatory capacities by themselves. From this perspective agricultural natures, because of their anthropogenic history, are always deficient natures that cannot be left unattended because otherwise they will not provide crucial services. Therefore, something must always be added to the agroecosystem from the outside.

Table 1.

Comparison of the material properties of chemical and biological pest control methods.

	Chemical	Biological
Temporality	Instantaneous, fading	Durable, repetitive
Norm	Juridical, disciplinary	Normativity of life
Spatiality	Local	Global
Degree of contingency	Low	High

Famously, philosopher Jacques Derrida called this “something” added to an incomplete nature a “supplement” (Derrida, 1997: 141–164). In contrast to the complement, which refers to an element of interiority, the supplement is an exterior element that adds qualities to an entity or system which it cannot produce itself, but nevertheless needs in order to be complete. The supplement fills a constitutive gap in an order that is not self-sufficient. It adds to nature what nature itself does not provide. Seen in this way, one could say that in entomological thinking the world of chemistry fills a void in the “governing mechanisms” (Stern et al., 1959: 86) of life by offering the necessary elements of control that the gentle regulatory mechanisms immanent to the agroecosystem cannot provide. However, such an act of supplementation is anything but innocuous. By compensating for deficits in the biological control mechanisms, the chemical supplement always threatens to undermine or even destroy them as well. In other words, the supplement has “pharmacological” qualities, it is something that “enables care to be taken and that of which care must be taken—in the sense that it is necessary to pay attention: its power is curative to the immeasurable extent [dans la mesure et al démesure] that it is also destructive” (Stiegler, 2013: 4). It is precisely the management of this supplemental or pharmacological quality of chemical pest control methods that is an important building block in the IPM strategy. It is intended to provide a framework that allows to harness the curative effects of chemical methods, without unleashing their toxic side-effects.

Integrating conflicting materialities—the economic threshold

The outlined material tension between biological and chemical pest control methods points to the specific biopolitical problem underlying IPM—to integrate the chemical supplement into biological control mechanisms while limiting its toxic side effects. But how do you fuse together what does not belong together? As scholars from the sociology of conventions, accounting studies and science and technology studies have shown, one of the most effective means of leveling qualitative differences and manufacturing a “flat”, governable world are technologies of measurement and quantification (Callon and Muniesa, 2005; Espeland and Stevens, 2008; Fourcade, 2011; Miller, 1992). Contrary to their positivist and inconspicuous aura, measurements and quantification processes are not neutral operations that simply uncover the world, but performative practices (Barad, 2012: 6–7) that create it. They are modern social forms that are able to create commensurability between two different entities by “transcribing the entities and phenomena to be handled and projecting them onto different registers of existence” (Brighenti, 2018, 39). This transformative power derives from their totalizing and de-singularizing capacity. Measurement and quantification are able to abstract from distinctive features of entities and thus reduce the irreducible. In this way, new links between objects and people can be forged, which would not have been possible before the quantifying operation (Espeland and Stevens, 2008: 408). By relating qualitatively different entities to a common metric, quantities like costs, scores, votes, ranks, standards, thresholds or cost-benefit schemes transform “difference into magnitude” (Espeland and Stevens, 1998: 316) establishing not only similarities and potentially identities between objects that would have been neglected without the process of quantification, but unfolding new terrains for practical intervention.

Quantification and measurement also play a key role in IPM. Before its implementation, the mere presence of a particular insect in an agroecosystem served as an indicator of infestation and necessary treatment. As Stern (1973: 260) puts it: “Many farmers had, or soon developed, the philosophy that there was no good bug except a dead bug”. Each sighting of a single unwanted insect was considered to indicate the presence of a plague. Thus, the distinction of presence/absence was the guiding form that structured the use of pesticides 19th and early 20th century agriculture. This thinking favored a pesticide strategy aimed at keeping the fields as pest-free as possible by applying pesticides on a regular and preventive basis. In contrast, the Californian entomologists emphasized that neither the presence of a pest population in an agroecosystem nor its temporary growth is a problem per se. Drawing on insights from ecology and population science, they argued that each population is subject to natural fluctuations, whose dynamics are influenced by a number of “density dependent” factors (see Smith, 1935). Depending on climate, food availability and the presence of natural predators, the density of the pest population fluctuates around a mean value. Accordingly, their efforts aimed at aligning the application of chemical pest control measures with natural fluctuations in pest populations. Since some insects are always present to a certain extent in an agroecosystem, the question was no longer whether a pest was present at all, but rather at which size a population would become an economic threat. Problems of quality are turned, therefore, into problems of quantity. In order to determine this point empirically and translate it into guidance for action, Stern and his colleagues (1959) proposed two intertwined economic concepts that were supposed to enable farmers to tolerate a certain amount of pests in the field and at the same time objectively determine those points at which the use of chemical pesticides appears acceptable or even necessary.

The first concept is the Economic Injury Level (EIL) and describes the point at which the damage caused to a pest population reaches intolerable levels and jeopardizes the farmer's income. Since not every pest infestation has to be considered an economic problem immediately (Warner, 2007: 47), “it is necessary to make estimations on the pest densities that can be tolerated” (FAO, 2017a: 5) and at what point the number of pests becomes an economic problem. Hence, the EIL can be understood as a measure to determine the “disaster threshold” (Luhmann, 1993: 2–3) of the agricultural system, the liminal point at which the damage reaches a level that threatens the economic existence of the farmer. On a first glance, the calculation of the EIL looks pretty straightforward. The costs (which include both ecological and economic costs) of a treatment of one hectare of farmland with pesticides (C), are divided through the price a certain type of crop (local currency/kg) would achieve on the market (V), the average amount of damage a certain pest causes to the crop (D) and the known or estimated effectiveness of the control mechanisms applied (K) in the ecosystem. Assuming that the relationship between the variables is linear, the function looks as follows (see Pedigo and Higley, 1992; Pedigo et al., 1986): $E I L = \frac{C}{V D K}$ or, alternatively (see FAO, 2018: 110)² $E T L = \frac{cost of control ($ / ha)}{commodity value ($ / kg) \times damage coefficient (kg / ha / # pest / ha)}$ On second inspection, however, this is anything but a simple calculation. Due to the fact that we are dealing with highly dynamic parameters, it is getting considerably more difficult to calculate fixed damage thresholds for certain pests. For instance, the price or the expected revenue of the agricultural product is by no means static, but is subject to socio-material dynamics such as changing environmental conditions, price fluctuations on local and global markets and even financial speculation. A similar problem arises when trying to accurately determine the damage caused by insects. While it is possible to predict the effects of high population densities on the crop for certain insects, this is not the case for all insect species. Some insects, such as the brown grasshopper which is wreaking havoc on rice fields in Asia (see Gan, 2017), are vectors for plant diseases that cause additional damage to plants, which makes it much more difficult to calculate their damage rate. In addition, the material and economic effects of a pest infestation vary from season to season and place to place, making it even harder to establish stable damage values. Finally, the efficiency of the control mechanisms is also subject to a high degree of uncertainty. Pesticide resistances can lead to a reduction in the effectiveness of control methods, which in turn increases the cost of procuring additional plant protection products (Castle and Naranjo, 2009: 1323; FAO, 2018: 110). The consequence is that the damage values are always locally and temporally situated values that have to be determined individually for each agro-ecosystem and have to be continuously revised. The damage threshold for a maize field in South America or Africa, where the “Fall Army Worm” is the main antagonist, differs from the damage threshold in wheat fields in North America, where the “stem sawfly” feels at home etc.

While considered the “backbone” (Kogan, 1998: 248) for IPM by entomologists, the EIL is only one part of the calculation. Because the EIL indicates the turning point when tolerable damage turns into intolerable damage, it is unsuitable as a guiding measure for concrete interventions, since once the EIL is reached the damage is already been done. This is why the EIL is always complemented by the “Economic Threshold” (ET). Compared to the EIL, the ET marks a more practical threshold for interventions. The ET was originally defined as the population density “at which control action should be determined to prevent an increasing pest population from reaching the economic injury level” (Stern et al., 1959: 86), a definition that is also used repeatedly in contemporary literature on IPM (Higley and Peterson, 2009; Pedigo and Higley, 1992). The ET refers to the latest point in time at which measures should be taken to prevent the population density from reaching catastrophic levels. In this sense, the ET marks the threshold of a temporal corridor in which there is still time to take measures against a looming catastrophe. It demarcates an interval, “a space-time for action in-between the onset of something new and the temporary stabilization of a changed present.” (Anderson, 2017: 470) Consequently, entomologies sometimes speak of an “action threshold” (Higley and Peterson, 2009: 27) to mark the action-triggering function of the ET. Once the threshold is touched, action is not only allowed but also required. The determination of the ET is based on the calculated value of the EIL, the actual population density of the pest and the degree of latency that the prospected control measures entail. This is why the ET is always set on a lower level than the EIL. If, for example, an economic loss would occur once a population density reaches a medium count of 10 larvae per plant, a possible action threshold could be at a density level of 8 larvae per plant, because this would open a “window of time” (ibid.) to avert economic loss.

Figure 1 schematically shows the control function of both thresholds and the temporal “action corridor” that is opened by their interaction. As soon as the natural fluctuations of insect populations enter the defined interval, measures are taken to prevent the biological “wave” from crossing the second threshold. The figure thus exhibits the “magical” (Brighenti, 2018: 29) power of quantitative calculi underlying IPM. It not only shows through which “fantastic but very concrete operations” (Fourcade, 2011: 1726) an ungovernable nature is transformed into a governable nature, but also how the material conflict between the biological and the chemical is settled. This commensurating operation comprises three steps: First the complexity of the ecosystem is reduced to one single indicator—the pest population curve. Other biotic factors (new predators, temperature fluctuations, changes in the food web etc.) prove relevant only if they are able to influence the pest population. Thus, the relational complexity of nature is reduced to its ecological-economic functions. Secondly, by linking it to the metric of economic losses, the meaning of the population curve is changed. It is no longer solely a biological indicator of the density of an insect population in an ecosystem, but also an economic indicator highlighting severity of damage. In other words, the inscription of ecological processes in the techno-scientific register of economic entomology changes the nature of nature, because it now becomes an abstract signifier of economic damage values. In fact, both become interchangeable, because an increasing pest population rate is equal to increasing economic damage. Third, economic thresholds divide the space of nature into three zones of risk management. The lower zone is the space of biological normality. Here, the farmer's role is mainly to ensure that the biological regulatory mechanisms of the agroecosystem keep the pest population in check. The agroecosystem is supposed to be governed in such a way that the natural control mechanisms keep the pest population at an acceptable level, for example by harnessing the control effects of natural predators or the rotation of crops. The middle zone—“the interval”—is the space of crisis and emergence. Once the population curve has moved into this area, risk management strategies of prevention and avoidance are no longer effective and have to be supplemented by reactive short-term measures. This zone also marks the moment when the biological has to be supplemented by the chemical, because in this zone the immanent governing mechanisms of life threaten to fail. Finally, the upper area beyond the EIL could be called the world of disaster. Once the curve has reached this zone, the damage has already been done and only damage limitation strategies or financial compensation measures remain as options for intervention.

Figure 1.

Two representations of the economic threshold model. The left model is taken from an FAO report on IPM in Eastern Europe published in 2017. The right model is the visualization as originally used by Stern et al. (1959). As can be seen, little has changed.

Risky farmers and calculative selves

So far, I have shown how the biological and the chemical are brought forth as two conflicting entities and how economic calculations are supposed to make both entities commensurable. Finally, in this section, I will elaborate briefly how IPM as a calculative device aims to influence the decision-making process of farmers. As I will show, the farmer's practice turns out to be the central reference problem of IPM, because it is the farmer who in the end has to manage the agroecosystem. That means that here, I am not so much concerned with “farmwork as performance” (Flachs and Richards, 2018) or the different ways IPM is implemented in national policies around the world. Rather, I focus on implicit regimes of subjectification that are inscribed in the strategy of IPM. This does not mean to negate the multiple modes of appropriation of these programs, their inherent contradictions, or difficulties encountered in their implementation. Programs like the IPM, of course, never translate seamlessly into practical action (Miller and Rose, 1990). They are assembled at various collective levels and affect the life of farmers in different ways. These various implementations are clearly beyond the scope of this paper. Here, following the work of Michel Foucault, I think of IPM strategies as “modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people” (Foucault, 1982: 221).³

As indicated in the first section, farmers’ pesticide practices were at the heart of discussions on IPM from the very beginning. Economic entomologists criticized the reckless and excessive use of chemical insecticides. Instead of being guided by scientifically sound data, farmers would have relied mainly on their intuition and everyday knowledge when applying them. Especially this lack of a scientific basis in pest control, it was repeatedly stated, “has unquestionably led to frequent erroneous judgements and unnecessary control measures” (Stern, 1973: 260). Sterns description exemplifies the peculiar ways of “problematization” (Foucault, 1989: 296) of pest control that underlies IPM. While entomologists are keenly aware of the dangers of chemical pesticides (DDT being the best example), environmental problems, from their perspective, cannot be attributed to the material agency of the chemicals alone; rather, these problems have to be understood primarily as a result of incorrect application practices. The chemicals, even though toxic in nature, are merely a “dangerous supplement,” which, when properly applied, unfolds its curative effects stabilizing the agricultural machine. Thus, one could say that the IPM inventors’ worries were not so much about “matters of concern”, but about “people of concern”. The inherent risks of non-human chemical agents, on the other hand, are manageable if the human agents manage their circulation responsibly.

The California entomologists therefore advocated for something they called “supervised control”

“In a supervised control program the farmer, or a group of farmers, contracts with a professional entomologist who determines the status of the insect populations. On the basis of his population counts, other conditions peculiar to each situation, and his knowledge of the ecology of the pests and their biological controls, the entomologist makes predictions as to the course of the population trends and advises as to when controls should be applied and what kind.” (Stern et al., 1959: 95)

Because farmers have always made bad decisions in pesticide use, experts (preferably entomologists) are now supposed to advise him on pest control. These experts monitor the farmer's agricultural field, observe the development of the pest population and make a recommendation as to when the use of pesticides is necessary. In other words: IPM assumes a kind of constitutive knowledge gap between farmers on the one hand and scientists on the other. Whereas farmers were previously the experts on their fields, they now are treated as laypeople who are merely acting intuitively and therefore need scientific advice.⁴

Today, as the ecological crisis has worsened, farmers practice in particular have become even more central to scientific and political attention. This is shown, for example, in the increased importance that earth system scientists have placed on smallholder practices in recent years. Seen as “primary stewards of our natural resources” (Rockström et al., 2017: 7), farmers are considered to be of significant importance for both food security and navigating the Anthropocene (Rockström et al., 2017). The problematization of farmers’ practices is particularly evident in publications by FAO, which has been a key player in the implementation of IPM strategies. As the IPM objectives of the FAO state:

“The goal of training for IPM is to empower farmers to make their own decisions. These decisions are usually economic decisions about pest control and base their action on the question ‘if I don't spray, will I loss some yield that is worth more than the cost of the spray?’ The decision requires knowledge of the agro-ecosystem: recognition of pests and natural enemies, understanding of the interaction of pests and natural enemies. The decision also requires knowledge of the effect of pests on the yield of the plant and the effect of pesticides on natural enemies.” (FAO, 2020: n.p.)

Here, too, the distinction between laypersons and experts becomes apparent. Farmers are portrayed here as poorly educated practitioners who are not yet capable of making their own (or at least “good”) decisions and thus need to be empowered.⁵ Here. making one's own decisions means being able to view that decision in the light of economic rationality and to assess its costs and benefits. However, from FAO's perspective, such a practice presupposes some knowledge of ecosystem interrelationships. Without an understanding of predator-host relationships in agroecosystems, the effects of certain pests on plants, or the intended and unintended effects of chemical pesticides on pests, no informed decision can be made. Particularly in times of climate change, this lack of knowledge becomes a problem:

“The changing environment means that many farmers and other producers can no longer rely on their local knowledge the way they have in the past. For that reason, farmers must be able to access ecology-literacy training, where new knowledge is generated locally to fit specific conditions, allowing farmers to master the management skills required to play a leading role in sustainably intensifying production.” (FAO, 2016: 6)

The traditional knowledge stocks of farmers, which have secured their subsistence for generations, reach their limits under conditions of ecological crisis. The ecological crisis requires new, more complex forms of knowledge that those affected cannot acquire themselves, but must be taught to them. Here, tropes of “developmentalism” (Escobar, 1995) are actualized by postulating an uneducated subject that has to be empowered by western scientific knowledge. Only the acquisition of this knowledge makes them capable of making good decisions, whereby capable of making good decisions in this context seems to mean aligning decisions on pesticide use with economic principles of costs and benefits.

This is why the FAO has started to establish so called IPM Farmer Field Schools (IPM-FFS) to teach IPM to farmers around the globe. First established in Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the pesticide crisis in the 1980s sparked by the “green revolution” (Van den Berg and Jiggins, 2007), the IPM-FFS have spread over Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and finally also Central Europe in the following years (FAO, 2016: 3). In contrast to the supervised control program IPM-FFS bet on a combination of theoretical seminars and field work, helping farmers to practice IPM on their fields. In addition to knowledge about plants, predator-host relationships and population dynamics, IPM-FFS also include seminars on pesticides and economic damage thresholds as part of the curriculum (FAO, 2018: 109). The overall aim of the IPM-FFS is to “help rural folks learn and develop the skills required for informed decision-making in complex domains: based on accurate problem analysis in local contexts, effective decisions can build on local knowledge, understanding of the local agro-ecology/agro-ecosystem, and existing capacities” (FAO, 2016: 2). Put differently, the goal is to implement a form of ecologically sustainable agriculture by training farmers to become competent decision-makers in pesticide use and enroll them in FAOs pursuit of Global Food Security and sustainable intensification of agriculture (see FAO, 2016: 6; Bernard de Raymond, 2020).

Although I cannot go into depth at this point, these discursive fragments already suggest how farmers portrayed as ill-educated subjects and their uninformed choices become the gravitational point of problem analyzes in IPM. This is why I suggest to read IPM as a “technology of government” (Miller, 1992) that seeks to govern the decision-making of farmers by evoking a functionalist and metric world in which farmers base their decisions on scientific reason. It is a tool to manage ecological problems of agriculture by encouraging farmers to align their decisions with economic principles, thus acting as “calculating selves” (Miller, 1992). Individuals are enrolled in the pursuit of prescribed ecological targets and objectives by the propagation of quantitative reasoning and the establishment of an calculative decision-making environment. The economic thresholds and damage values analyzed in the last section play a key role here, as they not only allow to fit chemical pesticides into the ecosystem, but also provide an objective framework that defines when a decision is correct or necessary. With the help of these calculative devices, individual discretion about pesticide use is replaced by the “mechanical objectivity” (Porter, 1995: xx). of standardized numbers. As one entomologist in her evaluation on IPM puts it, IPM “is an intervention that is aimed at strengthening the capacity of farmers to independently make scientifically based if-then decisions that translate into sound agronomic and environmental practices” (Price, 2001: 154, my italics). If a certain population threshold is exceeded, the use of pesticides is possible or even required. This way, agronomic and environmental sound practices become an effect of conditioned decisions and economic calculation. As soon as the farmers align their decisions with predefined economic threshold values (pest infestation, amount of damage, etc.) or other decision-rules, desirable ecological and economic effects are automatically achieved. Or, simply put, from good scientific decision-making rules follow good ecological results.

Conclusion

Until now IPM has achieved mixed results. On the one hand, IPM strategies do seem to have an effect on the use of chemical pesticides. For example, it is reported that the implementation of IPM strategies in Europe have reduced pesticide use by 20% compared to conventional pest control strategies (Freier and Boller, 2009: 436). On the other hand, the problems of pesticides in general, as the unfolding ecological crisis demonstrates, remain unsolved. The overwhelming loss of biodiversity, pollination decline and the poisoning of soil and water are just the most evident examples that highlight the virulence of the pesticide crisis. Proponents of IPM amount this shortcoming of pest control to insufficient implementation of IPM in agricultural policies, ill-defined thresholds, a blind focus on killing pests and poor pest sampling techniques. Thus, they advocate for big data technology and GM supported breeding of plant resistance to overcome the limits of classic IPM (Peterson et al., 2018). Critics of IPM, on the other hand, argue that the shortcomings of IPM strategies are grounded in its very abstract and reduced understanding of agroecosystems, making them ill-suited for a truly ecologic way of fighting pests from the very beginning. For them, the problem is closely tied to the fact that in IPM agroecosystems are conceptualized and treated as “essentially independent units often with scant regard for events in adjacent or proximate fields, let alone those considered distal to the management unit” (Zalucki et al., 2009: 86). IPMs ideal of “ecologists armed with chemicals” (Perkins, 1982: 73)—i.e. fitting chemical pesticides into ecosystems and keeping biology and chemistry separated—only makes sense in a world where agricultural fields are understood as singular, functional bubbles, which can be closed off and isolated from their environment. From this perspective, the ecological image enshrined in IPM resembles what anthropologist Anna Tsing called a “scalable” ecology (Tsing, 2015: 37–43). The European colonial plantation being the archetype of scalability, the concept refers to the uncanny but very modern project of creating a standardized and expandable form of agricultural production site, that is indifferent to the manifold interspecies relations of humans and non-humans and thus can be applied in different regions. In other words, the ecology of IPM, is grounded in a “productivist ontology” (Nimmo, 2020) which reduces agro-ecologies to its functional capacities of generating economic surpluses.

The findings presented in this article support this kind of analysis, yet adding another layer to it. By shedding some light on the rationalities, technologies, and subjectivities enshrined in IPM, I demonstrated, how the concept is not only closely tied to an understanding of agroecosystems as human-made production machines, but also how it mobilizes techno-scientific means of measurement and quantification to make these machines governable. IPM has to be understood as a calculative device that is intended to tackle ecologic problems by subverting the complexity of agricultural natures to economic reason and technologies of quantification, changing the nature of natures. That means that technologies of quantification should not simply be understood as means to measure, represent or visualize the processes of nature. Rather, they produce and format nature in a particular way. By relating disparate material entities such as insect populations, crops, and insecticides to a common metric of damage values and costs, techniques of quantification like the economic threshold turn nature into a function of economic rationalities. Only by this magical operation, I have shown, it becomes possible to fit chemical pesticides into the ecosystem. The economic threshold divides the pest management space into two interconnected areas, allowing farmers and practitioners to make biology and chemistry mutually translatable and make economically and environmentally sound decisions.

In fact, as Bernard de Raymond points out, this attempt to harmonize ecology and agricultural production by “trading-off” risks is a recurring theme in productivist food security rationalities such as the sustainable intensification paradigm: “What characterizes SI [sustainable intensification] is the idea that the different objectives that food systems must reach are competing, and that consequently, they cannot be achieved through the same activities, in the same place and at the same time” (Bernard de Raymond, 2019: 28). The decision-making environment created by the economic thresholds enables a similar kind of trade-off operation. By setting a fixed, measurable value, the threshold allows to determine exactly the point at which economic risks outweigh ecological risks. Thus, while alternative forms of agriculture such as organic farming or permaculture movements try to tackle the agricultural challenges of the Anthropocene by exploring alternative ontologies of human-non-human relationships (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 169–215), IPM is another technology that seeks to optimize and stabilize the current food system by mitigating its inherent risks and tendencies toward self-destruction (Wolff, 2021). This does not mean that agriculture as a whole has to be transformed into permaculture or that IPM should be dropped as a strategy and concept. But it does mean that its inherent rationality and ontology has to be reflected. As long as environmental strategies are grounded in an ontology that conceptualizes agricultural ecologies as scalable and mechanistic production units, it remains questionable whether strategies like IPM will be able to tackle the challenges of the ecological crisis.

Highlights

The article analyzes Integrated Pest Management, a little-noticed, but central biopolitical technology of government.

The article makes an innovative contribution to the debate on biopolitics by showing how the living and the nonliving are integrated.

The article elaborates how economic calculations and techniques of quantification are mobilized to make pest environments governable.

The article shows how ecology becomes an effect of economic and calculative practices.

The article shows how IPM aims to transform farmers’ decision-making practices.

Footnotes

I would like to thank Sven Opitz for discussing several versions of this article with me. Furthermore,I would like to thank Constanze Erhard,Julian Höhmann,Carolin Mezes,and Franziska von Verschuer for numerous comments,suggestions,and help. Finally,I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers whose critical comments helped me to improve the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Leon Wolff

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