Extent of Adoption and Knowledge on Pesticide Use in Vegetable Production in Narsingdi District, Bangladesh

Date of Submission: 12-05-2019 Date of Acceptance: 04-04-2020 Abstract Farmers use various pesticides indiscriminately in their vegetable fields throughout the cropping seasons in Bangladesh. The present study therefore, examined farmers’ extent of adoption and knowledge on pesticide use in vegetable production. The study was conducted in four villages of Narsingdi district, Bangladesh, where 110 vegetable farmers were selected as sample following disproportionate random sampling technique. Interview schedule was used for collection of data. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used in the analysis. Results revealed that most of the respondents were 35 years above, literate, had less than seven family members, small farm size (0.02-1.01 ha), moderate contact with information sources (80.9%), low annual income (66.4%) and received training (64.54 %) on pesticide use. Brinjal and cucurbits had the highest pesticide use among the vegetables, while the mostly used pesticides were Topten 1.8 EC, Actara insecticide and Thiovit fungicide. The extent of pesticide adoption was high (91.0%) and all (100.0%) of the respondents had low to moderate knowledge on pesticide use. Contact with information sources (r = 0.32) showed significant relationship with knowledge on pesticide use. Hence, government should strengthen information and regulations in order to raise awareness on safe use of pesticide.


Introduction
Most of the farmers in Bangladesh cultivate rice and vegetables. Vegetables form an essential ingredient of human diets for maintenance of good health and disease prevention. Bangladesh has been experiencing annual increase in the vegetables export volume. Thus, there is a great prospect for the country to earn foreign exchange by exporting vegetables. As many as 54 different kinds of vegetables are exported from Bangladesh (BBS 2008). The vegetable sub-sector occupies a significant position in the export sector, helps increase foreign earnings as well as economic growth. Bangladesh earned BDT 1456.33 million (USD 43.33 million) in the year 2004-05 by exporting vegetables, which constitutes 70.08 percent of the earning from agricultural products (Karim et al. 2005). Although, a number of studies (Shadequl-Islam et al. 2012;Bhattacharjee et al. 2013;Chowdhury et al. 2014;Miah et al. 2014) that are reported on pesticide use and its harmful effects in Bangladesh, a very little was done in the area of rural vegetable farmers' adoption and knowledge on pesticide use in vegetables production. Therefore, the present research study sought to address this gap by investigating the farmers' extent of adoption and knowledge on pesticide use in vegetables production in Narsingdi district of Bangladesh.

Materials and Methods
The study was conducted in four villages namely Dewaner Char, Char Ujilab, Amlaba and Baroicha in Narsingdi district, Bangladesh.
Narsingdi district was selected due to its high Thus, calculated using the following formula: Based on the scores (%) obtained, the respondents were categorized into low, medium and high adoption.
On the other hand, knowledge on pesticide use was measured through eleven constructed questions that covered relevant areas of pesticide use. Two marks were allotted for each question. A respondent is given full marks (2) for correct answer; half (1) for partial answer and zero for incorrect answer or no answer.
Thus, the total marks to eleven constructed question is 22. To measure respondents' contact with information sources (television, radio, change agent, NGOs, newspaper, friends, family, relative, model farmers and local leaders etc.), a 4-point rating scale was used for checking any of the responses-most often, often, rarely and never with scores of '4', '3', '2', and '1', respectively. The total rank score for a farmer was obtained by adding the individual score of each item which was subsequently cumulated and categorized into low, moderate and high.
The SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used to perform data analysis.
Descriptive statistical measures such as frequency, mean, percent and standard deviation were used to describe and interpret the data. Correlation (Spearman's rho) was employed to explore the relationship between selected socioeconomics characteristics of the respondents and their knowledge on pesticide use in vegetable production.

Socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents
Information shown in Table 1

Extent of adoption of pesticide in vegetable production
The possible range of extent of adoption of pesticides by the respondents was 33.33 to 100 percent. The mean adoption score was 85.62. Based on observed range of extent of adoption, the respondents were classified into three categories as presented in Table   3. Table 3

Knowledge on pesticide use in vegetable production
Here, knowledge refers to the awareness of the vegetable farmers about different activities related to pesticide use for vegetable production in the selected areas.
The computed knowledge score of the respondents in the present study ranged from 9 to 20 with a mean 15.25 and standard deviation 2.58. The respondents were grouped into three categories presented in Table 4.

Socioeconomic Characteristics of the respondents and their Knowledge on Pesticide Use in Vegetable Production
Relationship between selected socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents and their knowledge on pesticide use in vegetable production was examined by testing the null hypothesis: "There is no significant relationship between selected socioeconomic characteristics of the farmers and their knowledge on pesticide use". The findings presented in Table 5

Conclusions
Based Therefore, increase in contact with information source will lead to increase (though minimal) in knowledge on pesticide use in vegetable production.

Acknowledgment
The authors thank Department of Agricultural