Aspects related to decision support tools and Integrated Pest Management in food chains

There are a number of tools available for pest management in stored product protection and in the food industry, but often the effectiveness of these approaches and how best to integrate them into a coherent and effective Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programme are not well understood. Many questions remain about the use of these tools, from the very practical issues such as how many traps are needed and which types work best, to fundamental issues concerning the relationship between trap captures and pest population density, distribution and level of product infestation. Limited acceptance of IPM in food facilities is partially explained by a combination of: costs of responsive pest control interventions; difficulty in sampling properly, combined with unreliable sampling data; calculations of action thresholds being too simplistic. In operational practice precise treatment thresholds and economic injury levels have not been developed, and standards and rejection criteria are inconsistent and difficult to apply. As a result, treatments based on an economic threshold are not typically performed and control strategies are often applied preventively, even when using tactics that do not have any residual effect. In current practice, many locations still rely on calendar-based pesticide applications and have little understanding of the basis of pest management.