A collaborative success: Cotton bollworm research
team member and PhD candidate Ganesh Behere
showing a bollworm atttacking corn.

Research groups in India, with help from University of Melbourne scientists, are beginning to turn the tide in a war against the cotton bollworm – an agricultural pest that causes $US5 billion damage across the world each year.

The cotton bollworm is the world’s number one agricultural pest, attacking more than 100 different crop plants, including cotton.

The late 1990s saw almost 40 per cent of the cost of cotton farming across Asia go to controlling pests, particularly the cotton bollworm­ – which is resistant to many of the insecticides traditionally used to control it.

Collaborative studies on the genetic and biochemical basis of this resistance have led to the development of a simple but science-based integrated pest management program designed to reduce the bollworm’s impact.

Early small-scale tests have shown the new program overwhelmingly increases the efficacy of insecticide application. More recently a larger national program across India, also trialled in China and Pakistan, has achieved a 50 per cent drop in insecticide use, coupled with a 10–15 per cent increase in yield – greatly enhancing cotton profitability for small farmers.

University of Melbourne research team leader, Associate Professor Derek Russell, reports the application of relatively simple insecticide rotations, backed by sophisticated laboratory and field science, has already doubled income from cotton for many thousands of poor farming families across Asia. “And it has given the Indian government a more than 40:1 return for every dollar it has invested in the national program,” he says.

The group responsible for the program received the Indian Council for Agricultural Research Award for Team Science in 2006.

The program’s success has been widely publicised throughout India in numerous newspapers and broadcasts and also directly to the farmers, in meetings, training camps and short plays put on in villages.

Almost 90 000 farmers grow cotton across more than 1000 villages in all 11 states involved in the program in India. As these numbers increase the benefits of the program can only grow, says Associate Professor Russell.

He points out that this scale of benefits has been obtained from conventional analyses of the biochemical mechanisms and inheritance patterns of resistance in the cotton bollworm. “A further quantum leap could be made if we had the sequenced genome of this insect which is such a drag on the livelihoods of so many millions world wide,” he says.