Abstract
The success or failure of a disease control strategy can be significantly affected by the behaviour of individual agents involved, influencing the effectiveness of disease control, its cost and sustainability. This behaviour has rarely been considered in agricultural systems, where there is significant opportunity for impact. Efforts to increase the adoption of control while decreasing oscillations in adoption and yield, particularly through the administration of subsidies, could increase the effectiveness of interventions. We study individual behaviour for the deployment of clean seed systems to control cassava brown streak disease in East Africa, noting that high disease pressure is important to stimulate grower demand of the control strategy. We show that it is not necessary to invest heavily in formal promotional or educational campaigns, as word-of-mouth is often sufficient to endorse the system. At the same time, for improved planting material to have an impact on increasing yields, it needs to be of a sufficient standard to restrict epidemic spread significantly. Finally, even a simple subsidy of clean planting material may be effective in disease control, as well as reducing oscillations in adoption, as long as it reaches a range of different users every season.
Highlights
The adoption of a costly control strategy for disease can be viewed as a public goods problem, and has been studied in many systems, for vaccination (e.g. [1]; for a review, see [2])
We outline the model below, which is simulated in Matlab, where further details of the disease dynamics model can be found in McQuaid et al [16]
We investigate the sensitivity of the model to the cultural setting and grower behaviour, with a discussion of the disease model to be found in McQuaid et al [16], noting that in the absence of a grower behaviour model the system tends towards a steady state containing both infected and susceptible plants, while in the absence of control the disease becomes ubiquitous
Summary
The adoption of a costly control strategy for disease can be viewed as a public goods problem, and has been studied in many systems, for vaccination (e.g. [1]; for a review, see [2]). The adoption of a costly control strategy for disease can be viewed as a public goods problem, and has been studied in many systems, for vaccination Oscillations in adoption of the control strategy are often observed; waves of infection and subsequent adoption are followed by a decrease in adoption as infection declines and control is deemed too costly in the absence, followed by a resurgence, of infection Apply the control, may reduce the success of a disease control strategy for structured populations [1]. It is important to integrate considerations of grower behaviour with those of disease to determine policy Such integration has seldom been done for agriculture ( see [4,7]), but which could benefit greatly from the increased stability and savings incurred
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