Pest management and food production: Looking to the future

In this comprehensive paper, Montague Yudelman, Annu Ratta, and David Nygaard examine the key issues with regard to pest management and food production over the coming decades. They draw attention to the lack of adequate information on the magnitude and impact of pest losses; without such information, policy makers are handicapped when devising strategies for meeting food needs. The authors address both chemical and non-chemical approaches to pest management, highlighting the importance of biotechnology. There is growing public sentiment against biotechnology but little appreciation as yet of its contributions to alleviating hunger by, among other things, controlling pest losses. The authors also ad dress the important subject of the roles of different actors in pest management, most notably the private sector.