Agricultural Horizons: Research, Technology and Sustainable Development Vol. 7

Modern crop production depends on suppressing damaging herbivores while retaining the insects and other arthropods that pollinate crops and regulate pest populations. Yet pest-control decisions, pesticide risk assessment and habitat interventions are often evaluated against separate ecological or agronomic objectives. This critical narrative review examines whether integrated pest and pollinator management can reconcile these objectives across cropping systems, distinguishing gains in beneficial arthropod abundance from demonstrated changes in ecosystem service delivery, marketable yield and economic return. Peer-reviewed field experiments, meta-analyses and mechanistic studies were appraised alongside evidence on pesticide exposure, landscape configuration and implementation constraints. The literature supports several robust propositions: diverse wild insects contribute substantially to crop pollination; resident predators and parasitoids can suppress pests; some diversification practices improve multiple ecological functions; and broad-spectrum or prophylactic insecticide exposure can undermine non-target arthropod performance. However, favourable responses in flower visitation or natural enemy abundance frequently fail to translate into reliable pest suppression or measurable yield gains. Outcomes differ with crop dependence on animal pollination, pest biology, habitat age and composition, the spatial and temporal organisation of fields, and pesticide exposure beyond treated crop boundaries. Contradictory landscape-scale findings caution against treating seminatural habitat as a universally sufficient intervention. An operational approach is therefore proposed that combines crop-specific economic thresholds, prevention-first pest management, exposure-aware intervention selection, habitat design for identified functional guilds, and joint monitoring of pest losses, pollination, biodiversity and profitability. Priority research needs include multi-season factorial field experiments, species-specific and mixture-sensitive risk assessment, economic evaluation, and tests across underrepresented tropical and smallholder systems. Reconciling pest control with beneficial arthropod conservation is feasible in some circumstances, but requires explicit attention to trade-offs and stronger causal evidence rather than assuming that ecological and productive benefits invariably coincide.