website | https://www.pestinfo.org/ISPIdata/public/home |
website | https://www.pestinfo.org/ISPIdata/public/home |
Invasive insect pests are a significant and accelerating threat to agricultural productivity, they degrade wilderness areas, and reduce quality of life in urban zones. Introduction biological control, the introduction, release, and establishment of host-specific efficacious natural enemies, is an effective management tool for permanently suppressing invasive pest populations over vast areas, often to levels that may no longer cause economic or environmental damage. However, introduction biological control programs are reactive: they are only initiated after an invasive pest has established, spread, and is causing damage that requires mitigation. Host specificity and host range testing of natural enemies for use in an introduction biological control program against an invasive pest can take years to complete. During this time, the target pest population continues to increase, invades new areas, and inflicts damage. Proactive biological control research programs identify prior to their establishment pest species that have high invasion potential and are likely to cause economic or environmental damage once established. Natural enemies are selected, screened, and if sufficiently host-specific, approved for release in advance of the anticipated establishment of the target pest. Following detection of the target pest and determination that incipient populations cannot be eradicated, natural enemies already approved for release are liberated into infested areas. This proactive approach to introduction biological control could significantly reduce project development time post-invasion, thereby lessening opportunities for pest populations to build, spread, and cause damage.
Coffee is an important commodity in Latin America that is grown by smallholder farmers and large-scale coffee producers. The coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei Ferrari (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae) is a major pest of coffee that originates from West Africa and has invaded all coffee-producing regions. With climate change, the problems that this beetle poses to coffee production are expected to increase. Controlling this pest is a true challenge and chemical insecticides still are one of the main tools used, despite the environmental and human-health issues associated with this approach. To find sustainable alternatives for chemical control of the coffee berry borer, classical biological control, augmentative biological control, and integrated pest management have received extensive attention. Parasitoids, predators, entomopathogenic fungi, and nematodes have been identified and studied for their potential to manage the infestations of this major coffee pest. Conservation biological control has recently gained more attention, but its development is still in its infancy. In this review, we examine strategies for the control of the coffee berry borer in Latin America. We identify knowledge gaps for developing sustainable biological control programs, including conservation biological control within the context of farming systems, land use in the surrounding landscape, as well as the vision of coffee growers.