ABSTRACT
AN AGRICULTURAL ‘SYSTEMS-BASED’ FRAMEWORK FOR INDEXING POTENTIAL EXPOSURE TO FARMING PESTICIDES: TEST FINDINGS FROM ASIA-PACIFIC, AND ASEAN
Journal: Malaysian Journal of Sustainable Agriculture (MJSA)
Author: Ellis Wongsearaya
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
DOI: 10.26480/mjsa.02.2022.131.141
The issue of ASEAN food security has led to chemical pesticides-driven policy directives as economic convention for protecting crop yields while concomitantly conferring an implicit ecological and health risk-based ‘trade-off’ that works to undermine SDG target indicators 2.4, 3.9, and 6.3. In this study the Pesticides Consumer-Environmental Indexing System (PCE-ISys), a conceptual heuristic ‘systems-based’ framework is proposed to explore needed policy-informing option(s) beyond the largely cost-externalising rubric of chemical crop protection management, by indexing (the potential for and magnitude of potential) pesticides exposure (EIR-IS) using a semi-quantitative tiered percentile-based, continuous-to-discrete variable transform that captures the stochastic distribution arising from the ‘generalisable’ interconnectivity of political governance, agricultural economy, and natural environment. 1990-2016 indexing results revealed ‘high’ EIR-IS levels for 52% and 63% of Asia-Pacific and ASEAN nations, respectively, with 28% of Asia-Pacific countries scoring at ‘highest’ indexing levels demonstrating pervasive and expansive pesticides-use and/or tonnage contrary to IPM sustainable agricultural practices.
| Pages | 131-141 |
| Year | 2022 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Volume | 6 |
