Despite its successes and overwhelming support in the scientific community, IPM suffers from low adoption in both developed and developing countries.  To identify current obstacles, participants at IPM in Developing Countries, a 2011 workshop held in Ecuador, designed, implemented and recently published results of a survey of colleagues. In phase one, the survey generated 413 open-ended responses, including 51 unique barriers.  The most frequent responses were insufficient training and technical support to farmers, followed by lack of favorable government policies and support, with 53 and 39 occurrences respectively.  The next most frequent were low farmer education and literacy levels (22), difficulty vs. conventional management with pesticides (18), influence of the pesticide industry (16) and shortage of IPM funding, especially long-term funding (16).

 These 51 obstacles were then ranked by 163 IPM professionals and practitioners from 96 countries.  Eighty percent of participants were from developing countries. Dr. Soroush Parsa, lead study author and researcher at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, reports:  "Variability in how people rank the importance of these obstacles can be explained by the region of practice."  Participants in the developing world ranked the single most important obstacle as the necessity of collective, community-wide cooperation in order to enact IPM practices.  Dr. Parsa elaborated that, from the perspective of the developing world, "many IPM tactics may be susceptible to a collective-action dilemma."  In contrast, respondents from the developed world ranked community wide cooperation 28th out of 51 obstacles, placing a lack of well-qualified IPM extensionists and IPM experts in the top spot.

This survey echoes findings from the 1992 US EPA-sponsored National IPM Forum held in Arlington, Va.  Forum participants from government, academia and industry, and crop producers at four subsequent regional stakeholder workshops identified major constraints including a lack of national commitment (Forum participants) and lack of economic incentives (producers). The two groups agreed on four other constraints:  insufficient funding for IPM implementation, infrastructure and applied research; burdensome EPA regulations; pre-existing agricultural policies uninformed by IPM; and a lack of federal, state and private sector coordination.