Pesticide application remains an important component of rice pest management in Việt Nam and responsible use should be integrated back into a strategy of good agricultural practices. Crucial skills that need to be fostered include: better product selection with safe and efficient application; the role of action thresholds must also be re-considered.With such an important crop, strategies for good management perhaps inevitably become rather political in nature, with perverse consequences at the technical level. In many rice growing countries (besides VN) it is possible to identify where improvements may be made to pest management practices. There are a number of common issues, that sometimes become conflated and adopting an €˜anti-pesticide’ stance is not helpful: much better, surely, to adopt a set of rules where pesticides are truly used judiciously and as a last resort, on the understanding that a preventative approach is the basis of IPM. Over the coming years we intend to put this into practice.
