AN AGRICULTURAL ‘SYSTEMS-BASED’ FRAMEWORK FOR INDEXING POTENTIAL EXPOSURE TO FARMING PESTICIDES: TEST FINDINGS FROM ASIA-PACIFIC, AND ASEAN

The issue of ASEAN food security has led to chemical pesticides-driven policy directives as economic convention for protecting crop yields while concomitantly conferring an implicit ecological and health risk-based ‘trade-off’ that works to undermine SDG target indicators 2.4, 3.9, and 6.3. In this study the Pesticides Consumer-Environmental Indexing System (PCE-ISys), a conceptual heuristic ‘systems-based’ framework is proposed to explore needed policy-informing option(s) beyond the largely cost-externalising rubric of chemical crop protection management, by indexing (the potential for and magnitude of potential) pesticides exposure (EIR-IS) using a semi-quantitative tiered percentile-based, continuous-to-discrete variable transform that captures the stochastic distribution arising from the ‘generalisable’ interconnectivity of political governance, agricultural economy, and natural environment. 1990-2016 indexing results revealed ‘high’ EIR-IS levels for 52% and 63% of Asia-Pacific and ASEAN nations, respectively, with 28% of Asia-Pacific countries scoring at ‘highest’ indexing levels demonstrating pervasive and expansive pesticides-use and/or tonnage contrary to IPM sustainable agricultural practices.