Unions promote Integrated Pest Management 

Agricultural workers are acutely aware that chemical pesticides are bad for their health and that of their families and communities. 'What are the alternatives and how do we stop using these poisons' are the questions most frequently asked at health and safety workshops for pesticide operators. 

IUF members in Uganda collecting specimens at an IPM workshop. Photo Omara Amuko/NUPAW

One answer to these questions is to encourage workers through their unions to learn about and promote the use of non-chemical Integrated Pest Management (IPM) techniques and programmes for weed, insect pest, and disease control on the farms and plantations where they work. Each IPM programme has to be adapted to the particular crop and local growing situation. IPM is not the off-the shelf solution offered by chemical pesticides: it is a combination of farm management techniques - better soil preparation, or choosing crop varieties resistant to certain insect pests or diseases, for example - used in an integrated manner. A central feature of any IPM programme is maximising the use of naturally occurring beneficial insects to control insect crop pests. This means the farmer or grower has to learn to leave wild plants, some of them 'weeds', in or on the field margins of the crop as these are the plants on which the natural insect predators live, feed and breed.
    Normally it is farmers who receive training in IPM techniques, especially through educational methods called Farmer Field Schools (FFS). The International Union of Food Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers Associations (IUF) is now working with the Global IPM Facility (a joint programme of the World Bank, FAO, UN Development Programme and the UN Environment Programme), to ensure that agricultural workers and their unions receive training in IPM using the FFS method. This requires workers to go into a field to study how a crop grows, to learn to identify harmful insects, diseases and weeds, and encourage beneficial insects. The workers then draw up their own agro-ecology plan for their particular crop and protect it from pest and disease attack and weed competition by non-chemical means. The aim is to give agricultural workers the knowledge and skills of IPM so that when instructed by an employer/manager to use a toxic pesticide, they can point out that theirs is a safer way of controlling the pests using IPM techniques.
    At the end of May, two week-long pilot IPM courses - the first ever for trade unionists - were held for IUF agricultural affiliates in Tanzania and Uganda. Some NGOS and organic farming organisations were also invited by the unions to participate in the workshops. The training was given by professional IPM trainers from CABI Bioscience, an organisation working with the Global IPM Facility. In total some 40 workers were trained and will now be applying their new knowledge and skills back in the workplace to reduce pesticide use and improve health and safety standards. The IUF and the Facility will evaluate the courses as a basis for future co-operation.

IUF News Bulletin, Vol. 71, No. 3-4, 2001.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 53, September 2001, page 15]