Actual status and perspectives of the biological control through inundative releases in Brazil

Abstract

The applied biological control deals with the mass production of natural enemies in laboratory using natural or factitious hosts. Presently, developed countries are making big investments trying the production of natural enemies in vitro, which means the rearing of parasitoids (or predators) using artificial diets to reduce the costs of production. In Brazil, there are excellent biological control programs as compared to some best ones of the world, in spite of only a few number of researchers are really studying insect rearing and mass production. The most important biological control programs have financial support from the federal government agencies which gives natural enemies to the farmers completely free of charges. Thus, it is necessary to consider the biological control agents as the chemicals which have a production cost to control the pests. In addition, it is necessary in developing countries increase the number of researchers dealing with the basic areas of biological control (taxonomy, biology, ecology, nutrition, physiology, genetics, relationship between pests/natural enemies and so on) and provide more funds for this kind of research. With these improvements and considering the biological control programs which we do have and the potential biological control agents existing in Brazil, it will be possible to increase the biological control utilization in pest management programs.