The reactive trap: fall armyworm management inaction among Nigerian smallholder farmers

Abstract Fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (J. E. Smith) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), has been established across Nigeria since 2016, yet a substantial proportion of smallholder farmers take no action against it. Existing farmer studies almost invariably sample households that have already experienced an outbreak, which renders inaction invisible and leaves its determinants untested. We surveyed 740 smallholder farmers across ten locations in five agroecological zones of Nigeria between May and August 2022, and classified pest management behaviour into three outcomes: no action, chemical control only, and other or mixed methods. No action was reported by 308 farmers (41.6%), chemical control by 274 (37.0%), and other or mixed methods by 158 (21.4%). No respondent reported using any biological control product. Management behaviour was almost entirely determined by direct outbreak experience. All 283 farmers who had not experienced fall armyworm in the 2021/22 season took no action, while 432 of the 457 farmers who had experienced it (94.5%) acted. The association was statistically decisive but produced complete separation, so prior experience was characterised descriptively rather than modelled. In logistic regression excluding experience, no socioeconomic or institutional variable predicted either the decision to act or the choice of method. Zone-level inaction tracked zone-level outbreak incidence almost exactly ( r  = − 0.988, p  = 0.002, five zones), indicating that the apparent north to south gradient in management effort reflects the distribution of the pest rather than differences in farmer capacity. We describe this pattern as a reactive trap: farmers wait for personal loss before acting, so areas not yet reached remain structurally unprotected, and preventive technologies including biological control face a demand that materialises only after damage has occurred.