Much of what is being billed as modern IPM is really nothing more than a reinvention of the supervised control of 50 years ago. In many situations, pest consultants do not even practice supervised control because they may not monitor at all, or if they do, there is no effort to monitor natural-enemy populations. Many pest consultants are also employed by the pesticide industry and thus have a built-in conflict of interest. Also, alternative methods often require relatively more effort to implement as well as greater ecological understanding of the target system. Finally, there is virtually no integration of tactics.
Integration is critical both within a class of pests and among classes of pests.
This does not mean that the IPM movement was a complete failure. Considerable benefit was passed on to farmers in the form of models for predicting pest occurrence, plans to monitor pests, and treatment guidelines for use in supervised control. As a result, there has been some pesticide reduction in certain crops. In some ways, the chief beneficiaries of the IPM movement have been research scientists, extension agents, and government bureaucrats instead of the farmers. But complete IPM programs did not result, largely because not enough research effort was devoted to vertical and horizontal integration of tactics that could be implemented by the farmer.