December 1997, Volume 18 No. 4

Proceedings

The 1993 IUFRO Symposium

During the last two decades, increasing demand for industrial wood has led to an unprecedented expansion of forest plantations in the tropics, and this in turn has led to increasing incidence of pests and diseases, including the emergence of new problems. These proceedings* include 71 papers presented at the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO) meeting held in Kerala in November 1993 to focus attention on the economic impact of insect and disease problems in tropical forestry. The meeting marked a significant move to address the problem of quantifying damage from disease and insect pests in tropical forests and plantations, a topic which had rarely been addressed before, and never in such a comprehensive way.

For example, a paper by K. S. S. Nair and co-authors describes in detail the devastating effect of lepidopteran teak defoliators on volume increment of teak. These species have been major pests of teak in Asia for the better part of the 20th Century but quantifying losses has proved difficult. Nonetheless, the Kerala Forest Research Institute have through careful experimentation recently demonstrated that losses of as much as 80% volume increment are attributable to these pests. Careful studies such as this are now demon-strating the massive losses that major forest pests can inflict on their tree hosts.

*Nair, K. S. S.; Sharma, J. K.; Varma, R. V. (eds) (1996) Impact of diseases and insect pests in tropical forests. Proceedings of the IUFRO Symposium held in Peechi, India on 23-26 November 1993. Peechi, India; Kerala Forest Research Institute/Bangkok, Thailand; Forestry Research Support Programme for Asia and the Pacific, 521 pp.