This book uses the unique expertise of leading rice entomologists from Africa, Asia and the Americas to provide the first global coverage of rice insect pests. The groups of insects discussed are : Root and stem feeders, Stem borers, Rice gall midges, Leafhoppers and planthoppers, Foliage feeders and, finally, Panicle feeders. The book concludes with a discussion of integrated management of insect pests.

As a result of the green revolution, the use of yield-increasing inputs such as fer tilizer and pesticides became a matter of course in irrigated rice farming in Southeast Asia. Pesticides were applied liberally, both as a guarantee against crop failure and as a means of fully utilizing the existing yield potential of the crops. However, since outbreaks of pests, such as the brown planthopper (BPH) or the tungro virus, continued to occur despite the application of chemicals, a change of approach began to take place. It is now being realized more and more in Southeast Asia that crop protection problems cannot be resolved solely by the application of chemicals. In the past several years, increasing efforts have there fore been made to introduce, as a first step, supervised crop protection, leading gradually to integrated pest management (Kranz, 1982). Although the crop protection problems naturally differ in the different devel oping countries in Southeast Asia, the economic situation prevailing in these countries can nevertheless be regarded as an important common determinant: pesticide imports use up scarce foreign currency and thus compete with other imports essential to development. For the individual rice farmer, the problem is basically the same: his cash funds are limited and he must carefully weigh whether to use them for purchas ing pesticides, fertilizer or certified seed. In view of this constraint, it is becom ing necessary to abandon the purely prophylactic, routine calendar spraying and instead, employ critically timed and need-based pesticide applications.

Larry Pedigo and Marlin Rice have produced the top pest management textbook on the market for decades. New co-author Rayda Krell has helped bring the book into the twenty-first century. The successful core concepts of the book—understanding pests in their environment and using an ecological approach to combat them—remain as robust as ever. Features that instructors have come to rely on have been retained, including insect diagnostic boxes with detailed information on important species and species groups and an appendix with keys to major insect orders. New material on genetically modified plant species and regional pest technologies complement concepts in basic and applied entomology. Taxonomies and systematics of insects have been updated throughout the book.

Pest management has long been a problem for farmers worldwide and new techniques are continually being developed to reduce the adverse effects of pest populations. The use of areawide pest management has increased dramatically over the past decade and offers potential advantages to traditional and more localized approaches. Suppression over a broad area can reduce re-infestation of previously treated areas and the specific pest management techniques may be more effective when applied over larger areas. Providing the first comprehensive discussion of areawide pest management, this book will explore the theoretical development and implementation of techniques from a worldwide perspective. Areas covered include history and development, biological and ecological impacts and recent case studies of pest management programmes.

I. Fundamentals; II. Biology and ecology; III. Control tactics and strategies; IV. Implementation of rice IPM systems.