Weed Eradication: An Economic Perspective

A real world situation that exists between the willingness to pay and a natural resource is the economic perspective of weed eradication. Weed eradication is a strategy to completely remove an invasive weed specie. Dane Panetta, in the article “Weed Eradication-An Economic Perspective”, examines factors that influence the feasibility of weed eradication from an economic perspective. Panetta discusses how successful eradication may be more cost-effective than any other strategy to control weed invasions, only if it is considered feasible (Panetta, 2009). One of the many political issues affecting eradication is that funders are commonly unwilling to invest in alternative mitigated strategies. This post will include a brief summary of the article and a discussion on how the willingness to pay for successful eradication of invasive weeds depends of its feasibility.

Consequently, statistical approaches to estimate the efforts required for weed eradication are currently not very informative due to the lack of research and are not likely to become so in the foreseeable (Panetta, 2009). Research from field investigations may require years to complete since there is little known about some species which causes a problem in the review a full range of influential factors. The efforts to achieve weed eradication presently comprises of two factors. The factors include the requirements of detection to delimit an invasion plus the search and control efforts to prevent reproduction of an invasion until the entire infested area is eliminated. An example of a successful eradication program in the United States to date is the witchweed program that directly targeted soil seed