March 1997 Vol.18 No.1

Announcements

Are you producing a newsletter, holding a meeting, running an organization or rearing a natural enemy that you want other biocontrol workers to know about? Send us the details and we will announce it in BNI.

USDA Rules Discussion

The US Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service's Plant Protection and Quarantine section recently published an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on several issues pertaining to the current regulations on the importation and interstate movement of plant pests in the United States. The purpose of the ANPR is to generate public input to USDA for consideration in future regulatory decisions dealing with plant pests (and indirectly with biological control agents, pollinators, etc.). You may obtain a copy of the Federal Register document (61(189):50767-70) by visiting the APHIS web site at:

http://www.aphis.usda.gov/ppq/bats

To help generate informed input to the ANPR, PPQ recently established a HyperNews site on the WWW to stimulate informal discussion. The discussion site can be accessed from PPQ/BATS' website identified above or by going to:

http://www.aphis.usda.gov/cgi-bin/HyperNews/get/ppq/ppq-regs.html

To fully participate in the HyperNews discussion, individuals are encouraged to subscribe to the group. Also, as explained in the introduction to the site, all discussions on the site are considered informal and will not be part of the final "Public Record" for the ANPR. Procedures for providing formal written and oral input are described in the ANPR.

For further information contact: Dr Robert V. Flanders, Entomologist, USDA APHIS PPQ BATS,

Email: bflanders@aphis.usda.gov

Politics of Biocontrol

Erica Strauss has joined IIBC head-quarters at Silwood Park as a PhD student, jointly supervised by Jeff Waage of IIBC and John Mumford at the Imperial College Centre for Environmental Technology (ICCET). The subject of her PhD will be in the area of social, political and legal aspects of biological control, focussing on issues such as access to biological control agents, rights of indigenous people, bioprospecting, liability for biological control programmes, etc., all of which are becoming increasingly important in biological control projects. Erica has a university background in entomology (including biological control), media studies and law, and the legal side of her work will have the support of ICCET's sub-stantial environmental law group.

If you have any views in this area that you think would be of assistance to Erica in her work, please contact her at the IIBC address at the front of the journal, or on

Email: e.strauss@cabi.org.

Urban Information

Dr Roy Van Driesche, University of Massachusetts, is trying to draw together information on biological control in the urban environment (the outdoor landscape of ornamental plants, gardens and yard tree fruit; indoor insects will be covered to a lesser degree). This would include insects and weeds, mainly via natural enemy introduction, but also conser-vation or augmentation if they are specifically developed for the urban environment. He plans to review past articles (e.g. Clausen 1978) and would like suggestions as to the best summaries to consult, plus references to particular projects.

To make sense out of this list of projects, he will be organizing comments around several key ques-tions, looking for examples of each:

1. Is it realistic to mount importation projects against insect pests of exotic ornamentals, or is the cost too great in relation to the need? (For example, was the euonymus scale project in the US a good investment or not?). Will this get worse when (if?) host range testing of arthropods released against arthropods becomes part of project costs. Does this vary by the size of the state or area over which a particular plant is used? Do projects like the iceplant scale work in California still seem possible to do today?

2. Is biological control of agricultural pests that also occur in the urban environment a good strategy against pests that cannot be directly attacked in the crop due to a very low tolerance of the pest in crop? (For example, control of citrus blackfly and Caribfly in urban areas of Florida to reduce immigrant pest pressure in the groves).

3. Is the landscape industry's exten-sive use of exotic plants acceptable or not in view of the risk of introducing plants that become invasive weeds.

Comments and ideas about sources of information and examples are very welcome. Contact: Roy Van Driesche, Department of Entomology, University of Massachusetts, Fernald Hall, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA; Email: vandries@fnr.umass.edu;

fax: +1 413 545 2532.

GCPF

GIFAP, the international agrochemical industry federation, has restructured and changed its name to the Global Crop Protection Federation (GCPF). This reflects a broadening of interest to include all aspects of crop protec-tion. Six regional associations covering Europe, Africa/Middle East, Asia/Pacific, Japan, USA and Latin America and made up of national industry associations come under a secretariat in Brussels, Belgium.

The aim of the federation is to promote understanding of the crop protection industry's contribution to society by providing information on crop protection products, as well as helping the regional associations to comply with regulations for the manufacture, use and disposal of products. It will also promote inte-grated pest management and co-operate with national and inter-national organisations in the applica-tion of sustainable agriculture.