The Delicate Balance: Environment, Economics, Development The
Illusion of Integrated Pest Management Despite three decades of
research, there is very little "I" in IPM. It's time to start
over with an achievable goal. In 1993, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called for a national
commitment to implement Integrated Pest Management (IPM) on 75
percent of U. S. crop acreage by the year 2000. The next year,
USDA announced its IPM Initiative to embrace this commitment.
Seven years have passed, and farm practices have changed very
little. Indeed, the only significant change is that we know less
than what we thought we knew about what IPM is. Revisiting what
we mean by IPM will help us understand what went wrong with the
initiative. USDA and EPA struggled to come up with a workable
definition of IPM and a suitable way to assess its level of
adoption. This is not surprising, given the apparent confusion
among policymakers