March 1999, Volume 20 No. 1
The principal role of this journal is to provide information on scientific research in biological control. Through its News, however, it has focused on some important issues in the periphery of biological control, but of considerable relevance to it. One of these has been biotechnology. Biotechnologies for plant protection, epitomized by Bt crops, will particularly influence biological control through their impact on the development of regulatory procedures, their effect on the production and use of biopesticides, and through the way they are incorporated into IPM systems. One current concern is that these technologies will, indeed, not be treated as components of IPM at all, but as hi-tech alternatives to IPM. The risk is that biotechnologies will ultimately fail if insufficient attention is paid to ecological processes such as resistance development, non-target effects and the dynamics of pest complexes as we move from a pesticide-based to a biotechnology-based control system for just one pest species.
