A Gender study on resource use in onion integrated pest management

Abstract

Onion is one of the most important and export oriented commercial crop and grown in Western, Northern as well as in Southern India. Tamilnadu contributes significant contribution in the onion exportable production and also doing Integrated Pest Management practices in order to increase the productivity. This study made an attempt to analyse the extent of use and availability of IPM components in onion, cost and returns in the IPM practices in the major onion growing areas of Tamilnadu. Totally 90 respondents were identified and primary information were collected from 60 IPM adopters and 30 non-adopters. From the results, it was identified that majority of the IPM adopters and non-adopters were following safety measures and also was found that high cost of inputs and time consuming are main constraints among the IPM adopters. There is no difference among genders in IPM in input use. In IPM farm households, decision on crop selection was jointly taken by both the men and women whereas in non-IPM farms, male alone taking decision. Most of them have their own seed production. Both the gender was able to identify the infestation clearly due to pest and disease in case of IPM and non-IPM farmers.