Guideline to promote integrated pest management through Farmer Field Schools in smallholder agriculture in Ethiopia

Plant protection in Ethiopia formally begin in the 1940s with focus on promoting use of pesticides. To this date, the pest control measure with wider acceptance has been the use of second generation synthetic organic pesticides. The most used are the highly hazardous pesticides, which have the reputation of posing serious risk to health and the environment.In Ethiopia, the total area under crops production is well over 13milion hectares. On the other hand, the quantities of pesticides available every year have not been enough even to protect crops grown in 1million hectares. Despite this, there has been rampant misuse of pesticides affecting health and the environment. Moreover, the attainable yield remained low with substantial yield losses incurred every year due to pest damage. This indicates clearly that the increase in yield gain remained low. Thus, promoting IPM through FFS was thought to be the means for growing healthy crops with high yield, sustainably manage economic pests, reduce pesticide use and protect health and the environment.It was based on this that FAO promoted IPM through the FFS approach and achieved the following outputs: enhanced human and institutional capacity for promoting IPM in smallholder fields, established and capacitated IPM-FFS groups who successfully reduced economic damage by pests, generated scalable outputs, conducted experience-sharing events on the outputs and reached more smallholder farmers. Therefore, using the scaled-out outputs as empirical data this guideline to promote IPM through FFS in the smallholders’ farmers was developed to create wider awareness and further implementation.