Principles and recent applications of Area-Wide-IPM with an SIT component

E.F. Knipling, on the occasion of receiving the World Food Prize in 1992, stated that "major advances in coping with most of the major arthropod pest problems will require a change in the tactics and the strategies to manage those pests. They must change for the currently used limited scale, reactive, broad-spectrum measures to preventive approaches that are target specific and applied on an area-wide basis". Since then, practices to manage these pests have hardly changed and pesticide use is still on the rise every year to the detriment of the environment, human health and the ecosystem. The need for more target specific, sustainable, environmentally-friendly and cost-effective control tactics and pest management strategies remains to date more pertinent than ever. Integrated pest management (IPM) aims at the careful integration of several control tactics which are the most opportune for the particular ecosystem, while safeguarding human health and the environment. It has remained the dominant paradigm of pest control over the last half century. IPM can be applied on a field-by-field basis (localised IPM), or against an entire pest population within a delimited geographic area (area-wide (AW-IPM). AW-IPM seeks to treat all habitats, also those that are of no economic interest to the farmer, so that none produces migrants to re-establish significant infestations in areas of concern. This is in contrast to the field-by-field approach that focuses narrowly on defending the valued entity (crop, livestock, people, building, etc.). In most cases, AW-IPM leads to more effective and sustainable management of the insect pest. The sterile insect technique (SIT) is a species-specific autocidal control tactic that interferes with the reproductive potential of the target insect pest. It is a very powerful tool that is most effective when insect populations are low and when applied on an area-wide basis. The SIT within an AW-IPM context can be applied for the suppression, eradication, containment or prevention of insect pest populations. There are numerous AW-IPM programmes where the SIT has been used successfully, especially against dipteran and lepidopteran pests, and examples will be given to illustrate this. On economic, environmental and biological grounds, the case for SIT is compelling