INTRODUCTION World trade in agricultural commodities continues to grow. As agricultural trade expands, it increases the risk of introducing exotic insects into new areas where they may become plant pests. The establishment of new pests can be costly due to increased crop damage, control programs, and quarantine restrictions on trade. Quarantine or phytosanitary treatments such as cold, fumigati...

Phytosanitary treatments disinfest traded commodities of potential quarantine pests. Phytosanitary irradiation (PI) treatments use ionizing radiation to accomplish this, and, since their international commercial debut in 2004, the use of this technology has increased by ~10% annually. Generic PI treatments (one dose is used for a group of pests and/or commodities, although not all have been tes...

Increased homogeneity of agricultural landscapes in the last century has led to a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, management practices such as wildflower borders offer supplementary resources to many beneficial arthropods. There is evidence that these borders can increase beneficial arthropod abundance, including natural enemies of many pests. However, this increase in loc...

Stored insect pests can seriously depredate stored products causing worldwide economic losses. Pests enter countries traveling with transported goods. Inspection and Quarantine activities are essential to prevent the invasion and spread of pests. Identification of quarantine stored insect pests is an important component of the China’s Inspection and Quarantine procedure, and it is necessary not...

A multitude of insects and mites attack fruit crops throughout the tropics. The traditional method for controlling most of these pests is the application of chemical pesticides. Growing concern on the negative environmental effects has encouraged the development of alternatives. Inundatively and inoculatively applied microbial control agents (virus, bacteria, fungi, and entomopathogenic nematod...

Cotton has lost many ancestral defensive traits against key invertebrate pests. This is suggested by the levels of resistance to some pests found in wild cotton genotypes as well as in cultivated landraces and is a result of domestication and a long history of targeted breeding for yield and fiber quality, along with the capacity to control pests with pesticides. Genetic modification (GM) allow...