Bugs invade Falklands as biocontrol
Date: 25-Jun-04
Country: FALKLAND ISLANDS
Author: Ben Hirschler
The natural born killers, packed and sealed to prevent their escape on the Royal Air Force flight down to the South Atlantic, are headed for salad grower Tim Miller's greenhouses where they will sink their jaws into local pests.
Miller may be the world's most southerly exponent of biological control. His market garden in Port Stanley supplies the British garrison as well as visiting cruise ships and scientific bases in Antarctica.
He is far from alone.
Around the globe, the bug business is booming as farmers turn to insect predators and parasites - many of which will suck their prey dry or lay eggs in their still living bodies - as an alternative to chemical pesticides.
At Syngenta Bioline's insectary on the outskirts of Clacton-on-Sea, 27 different "beneficial" species are shipped to growers across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Japan.
Ladybirds packed in popcorn await dispatch to Saudi Arabia, alongside Encarsia formosa wasps for Spain and boxes of bumble bees destined to help pollinate British tomato plants.
Melvyn Fidgett, chief executive of Bioline, which is a subsidiary of Switzerland's Syngenta, the world's biggest agrichemicals firm, estimates some 200 billion bugs leave the premises each year.
ART OF BREEDING
That kind of volume requires industrial-scale production, and the world's number two bug supplier, behind Dutch-based Koppert Biological Systems, has perfected the art of breeding pests like white fly and spider mites in a sea of tobacco plants.
While the pests eat the leaves, the predators get to work eating the pests. Once the populations have reached the right level, operatives move into the greenhouses to start harvesting.
Just how the insects are collected is a closely guarded secret but the end result is a pile of "good guy" bugs ready for dispatch in paper packets that can be hung among crops or glued to cardboard strips as pupae to hatch later.
The bug business, while not new, has gained a huge boost in recent years from growing consumer concerns about food quality and fears of excessive pesticide use.
"The major driver for this is the grower's need for better pest control - but the supermarkets also like this approach because it shows the grower is not doing silly things with his crop," Fidgett said.
The International Biocontrol Manufacturers Association estimates that just over 300 million euros' (184 million pounds') of commercial bugs were sold in 2000, and it expects the figure to rise to some 400 million euros by 2010.
That is small compared to the global insecticide business, worth $6.7 billion in 2003, according to the independent market research group Phillips McDougall. But biocontrol can no longer be ignored.
NO PATENTS
In northern Europe, more than 90 percent of all crops in greenhouses are now grown using biocontrol, and the trend is spreading to the ornamental flower and pot plant market.
Growers in Spain and around the Mediterranean are also using beneficial bugs in plastic tunnels, while farmers in the United States, France and the Netherlands are scattering friendly bugs outdoors in maize, apples and pears.
Bug breeding may never be a big money-spinner, however, since unlike designer chemicals and genetically modified seed, bugs cannot be patented.
As a result, many of the players in biocontrol remain small family firms or agricultural cooperatives, making Syngenta's decision to enter the business a few years back a strange one at first sight.
Why would the world's biggest supplier of chemical sprays want to sell beneficial bugs that cut the need for pesticides?
The answer, according Fidgett, is to secure a foothold in tomorrow's crop protection market where mixing natural pest control with judicious spraying will be the key to success.
"We're definitely not the green apology for the company. This is all about creating an integrated approach to crop protection," he said
