Review of Agricultural Economics—Volume 29, Number 1—Pages 103–118 Is Environmentally Friendly Agriculture Less Profitable for Farmers? Evidence on Integrated Pest Management in Bangladesh

Concerns about the sustainability of conventional agriculture have prompted widespread introduction of integrated pest management (IPM), an ecologically based approach to con-trol harmful insects and weeds. IPM is intended to reduce ecological and health damage from chemical pesticides by using natural parasites and predators to control pest popu-lations. Since chemical pesticides are expensive for poor farmers, IPM offers the prospect of lower production costs and higher profitability. However, adoption of IPM may reduce profitability if it also lowers overall productivity or induces more intensive use of other production factors. On the other hand, IPM may actually promote more productive farm-ing by encouraging more skillful use of available resources. Data scarcity has hindered a full accounting of IPM’s impact on profitability, health, and local ecosystems. Using new survey data, this paper attempts such an accounting for rice farmers in Bangladesh. We compare outcomes for farming with IPM and conventional techniques, using input-use accounting and conventional production functions. All of our results suggest that the pro-ductivity of IPM rice farming is not significantly different from conventional farming. Since IPM reduces pesticide costs with no countervailing loss in production, it appears to be mor