ARI Working Paper Series

After more than three decades of the introduction of the Green Revolution with high crop productivity as the main objectives and results, yet with various unintended negative consequences, various parties have now seriously taken steps to counter the Green Revolution’s negative consequences on people and environment. One among others was the introduction of the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Programme in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with its new paradigm in empowering farmers and making them IPM experts, while producing healthy crops and conserving environments.

This paper aims to examine how the state in developing countries—which plays a significant role in managing and controlling rice crop, the main state’s agricultural commodity, and in some cases has heavily handed the top-down recommended policy and technology—responds to such a new paradigm. At the same time, the state is striving to improve agricultural productivity as well as its sustainability. To what extent has the state been able to achieve the objectives of the IPM Programme, in particular in empowering farmers and making them IPM experts within the context of the state’s current policy in agricultural development? To answer those questions, I examine two cases of the state’s responds to the introduction of the new paradigm, namely Cambodia and Thailand.

Variation did exist in each state’s responses at the time they were encountered with such a new paradigm in agricultural development and later, in the ways they developed the program. Despite the same methodology in carrying out the main IPM Programme through the so-called Farmer Field School (FFS) where a group of farmers were trained on the basis of farmers’ own discovery learning process, similarity was found in the state’s efforts to use the FFS to improve and/or correct farmers’ practices in rice farming. Improving agricultural techniques in a ‘top-down’ approach and ‘budget-driven’ is still prominently found within such a ‘people-centred’ and empowerment program.