Adaptive Management: A Methodology for Ecosystem and Community-based Rodent Management in Cambodia

There appears to be no easy solution to reducing crop damage caused by rodents in Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia. Agricultural and pest management scientists focusing on technological improvements have expressed frustration with the apparent slow uptake of management options produced from an 80-year history of research. In Cambodia, rats destroy an estimated average 0.1% of the total rice production area annually. This may sound barely perceptible, but damage is often very patchy and locally severe. An outbreak in 1996 was reported to have destroyed rice sufficient to feed over 50,000 people for one year. Typically, farmers’ rat management efforts have had poor success. There is an increasing awareness that traditional research, development and extension (RD&E) approaches have frequently led to inappropriate, irrelevant and unequally distributed technologies and unrepresentative decision-making. This paper provides an overview of one approach, adaptive management (AM), which aims to overcome these problems. An example of the application of AM to improve Cambodian RD&E in rodent management is also presented. We propose that the management of rodent problems in lowland rice could improve dramatically if approaches are community-based and if the concept of uncertainty is incorporated as an integral part of the decisionmaking process