Ecologial intensification for crop protection
We need to break away from intensive agriculture based on non-renewable and toxic inputs . Safer practices are indeed emerging. Sustainable agriculture started about 50 years ago with the design of integrated pest management (IPM) to counteract pesticide misuse and abuse. Ecological intensification emerged only a few years ago. Here we review the literature to compare ecological intensification and IPM, from the point of view of crop protection. We present also agroecology and organic farming. Neither ecological intensification nor IPM have philosophical bases such as agroecology, or to an even larger extent, biodynamic agriculture. Ecological intensification, IPM and agroecology are polysemous, flexible and pragmatic approaches, whereas organic farming is well-defined by its scope and standards. E cological intensification, in explicitly pursuing the goal of increasing food production to feed the planet, differs from agroecology, whose proponents think that the view that world hunger will be solved by merely increasing yield is an oversimplification. In terms of cropping system design, in its actual practice, IPM often remains based on methods that increase the efficiency of chemical pesticide use. Or, along with organic agriculture, it may remain based on substitution of pesticides by less harmful alternatives. In contrast, ecologically intensive crop protection usually requires cropping system redesign. In terms of ecosystem service provision, IPM tends to focus on the pest-pathogen regulation service. In contrast, both ecological intensification and agroecology pay attention to both practices which were designed for crop protection and biomass provision purposes, as well as practices with broader scope, primarily designed to offer other ecosystem services which are found to have indirect effects on crop protection. This chapter also describes selected tropical case studies of crop protection, such as upland rice seed-dressing and fruit fly control in orchards, to compare and contrast crop protection in these contexts. Finally, we propose to consider IPM and ecologically intensive crop protection as complementary rather than conflicting approaches. The concept of "ultimate IPM" brings IPM closer to ecologically intensive crop protection. This new approach involves starting from a nearly natural ecosystem to which inputs are gradually added when absolutely necessary, rather than starting from a conventional agroecosystem and gradually remove inputs from it.