On the face of it this approvals system appears flawless. However, it has a major drawback. There is no monitoring programme to police the use of pesticides. Therefore anyone can use anything with little fear of being caught and punished. Therefore there is no way of checking that government pesticides legislation is being obeyed. This is illustrated well by DDT. The Indonesian government banned the use of DDT (except for Anopheles mosquito control) in the early 1980s, however I spent several days in a farming region 60 miles outside Jakarta and talked to three farmers; two of the farmers freely admitted using DDT regularly on their crops. Both were unaware that there was anything wrong with the use of this highly effective and cheap pesticide. This is a tiny sample of farmers and might be unrepresentative. It may be however, that it is an accurate reflection of the situation. Most farmers in Indonesia work on a very small scale, are relatively poor and definitely do not understand the implications of the misuse of pesticides. Their primary concern is to grow food to feed their families and to sell their produce which allows them to buy essentials for their wives and children