Keynote Summary: The social side of pest and disease biosecurity: reflections from Australia

Abstract

5th International Research Conference on Huanglongbing, Florida, 2017 – Keynote summary The social side of pest and disease biosecurity: reflections from Australia RRJ McAllister 1 CSIRO, Australia. Citation: McAllister RRJ. 2017. The social side of pest and disease biosecurity: reflections from Australia. J Cit Pathol. iocv_journalcitruspathology_34958. Solving problems of plant pest and disease incursions in agricultural systems is complex. The environmental factors that underpin incursions like Huanglongbing (HLB) are hard enough to understand, but biosecurity challenges are, in addition, exemplified by the fact that humans are integral parts of both the problem and solution. When science misses this important point we tend to limit our research only to ‘hard’ science – yet in fact it is often the case that it is not the lack of hard science that is holding us back. So, with a focus on the “softer” social side of controlling plant pest and diseases in agriculture, it is fair to say people do two ‘inconvenient’ things that complicate the challenges. One is that, quite logically, pest and disease management is rarely the number one priority for growers. Growers not only have other pressing business issues to deal with, but they also have personal lives to attend to. This is perhaps obvious – but the implication is profound. When we try to motivate growers to manage their farms for pest and disease, rather than just focusing on their attitudes specifically to pest and disease management, we need to understand what motivates them more broadly. Rather than understanding attitudes to pest and disease management, we need to focus on any attitudes and behaviours that impact on pest and disease outcomes even if those have only an indirect influence. Fig. 1. Graphical representation of the complexity of social and policy interactions that contribute to decision-making for pest and disease control (taken from McAllister et al. 2017). These data show how individuals (circles) participated in the 2010-2011 Australian attempt to eradicate the Myrtle rust disease ‘Uredo rangelii’ (with squares representing the working and technical groups which were part of the eradication attempt). iocv_journalcitruspathology_34958