Introduction

In this brief essay I want to highlight some of the changes that have taken place in integrated pest management (IPM) over recent decades or that may become more important in our work:

1. from “magic bullet” to community level protection grounded in ecological theory

2. invasibility

3. from local to regional control of pests and vectors

4. redefining pest and disease resistance

5. preparing for uncertainty

6. relaxing the boundary conditions: from protecting a given crop or farm to asking what kind of agriculture is compatible with gentle technology and sustainability

7. the breeding of support species and guiding herbivore evolution

8. commercialization of IPM

9. a research perspective.

Early IPM was aimed at reducing the use of pesticides, especially the most toxic ones. Biological control was an obvious answer to the problem. Even before natural enemies could be used to replace the chemicals, ideas such as damage threshold or economic threshold allowed decisions to be made in each cropping season rather than by a fixed calendar schedule for spraying. This led to many ingenious monitoring methods to determine when intervention was required. Meanwhile, researchers sought out natural enemies of the pests and attempted to introduce them either to become established members of the community or through repeated release. Introduction of natural enemies is the stage of input substitution, in which a specific agent is used to control a particular pest. These biological agents were clearly gentler toward the environment and toward farm workers than the chemical pesticides but were conceptually similar and have been regarded as pesticides with wings, another kind of magic bullet.