Designing standards based on the fundamental principles of ecological plant protection

Summary

In ecological agriculture, diseases, pests, weeds and the like is not considered as problems in themselves. More are they symptoms of more fundamental problems like unnatural cropping systems. The focus in ecological plant protection should therefore not be on the elimination of pests, but on the prevention in terms of systems design. However, based on lack of knowledge and practical capability, problems do occur. Therefore some direct treatments are included in the IFOAM standards, and other regulations of ecological agriculture.
The ban on pesticides (and artificial fertilisers) in ecological agriculture has changed focus in direction of systems design. But the reason for this is by part, that knowledge about alternative treatments are limited. As time goes by, more research is done in the field of alternative treatments, and this tends to be the trend in ecological research programmes. These new technics will improve the farmers capability to control pests, diseases and weeds by direct treatments and thereby reduce the focus on systems design.
In future, the standard development must therefore either start limiting the use of some agronomic technics like mechanical weed control, as our knowledge of preventive measures increases; or the use of bans in the organic standards should be substituted by other regulation measures like some kinds of taxes that put a pressure on the farmer to solve the problems by means of more fundamental sound solutions.