Forschungsprojekte - Wu Lifeng

Impact assessment of IPM-FFS on cotton in China

The FAO/EU IPM program for cotton was initiated in China in 2000. Up to 1000 FFSs have been conducted in 5 provinces with more than 25,000 farmers trained to date. As self-evaluation an impact assessment was launched in 2001 when recall data were collected for the baseline year of 2000, and in 2002 an immediate impact survey was conducted. Primary analysis of the data shows that FFS training has singnificant impact on participating farmers' cotton yield, pesticide use and gross margin. Diffusion effect can also be identified with exposed farmers in some regards. Nevertheless that research is both temporally and spatially limited, it is a typically short run impact assessment and only 9 FFS villages were sampled in the surveys. In order to achieve a better representativeness of the sample to 1000 FFSs in China and measure both short term and long term impact, a third farm-level survey will be conducted in 2005 to cover much more FFSs. And in order to identify the "true" impact of FFS some appropriate approaches such as DD model (Difference in Difference model) and EIQ (environmental impact quotient of pesticides) will be applied in future analysis.