Invasive Alien Insect Pests: A jumping threat to food security and farmers’ livelihoods

Abstract

From time to time several exotic pests are invaded outside their native range into a particular area and causing potential havoc to food security and livelihoods of farmers. From the pretext, crops are constantly facing threats from many biotic stresses, particularly by invasive alien insect pests. These biological incursions cause extensive ecological damage and are quite detrimental to the major economic sectors including agriculture, horticulture, and forestry. Invasive alien pests are those that invaded the area where earlier these are not present in those areas by trade, transport or by human interference distributed to different geographic localities and colonialized successfully. Due to their polyphagous feeding habit, these non-indigenous pests cause a significant amount of damage to several food crops leaving farmers in distress besides fetching lower production and productivity. To curtail their growth and evelopment many natural enemies viz, predators and parasitoids which are the need of the hour had been imported from their native
place to control the exotic insect pests. The adoption of biological control to curb the spread of alien pests is ecologically and economically safe. However, if all the ecologically possible attempts become futile in controlling the pests, as a last resort chemical control with a different mode of action should be selected to make pest-resilient sustainable agriculture.