International co-operation for coconut pest management

COCONUT Research Institute of Sri Lanka initiated a research project on Coconut Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in January 2004 with the collaboration of the Asia and Pacific Coconut Community (APCC), Indonesia.

The project is funded by the Common Fund for Commodity (CFC) and Department for International Development (DIFD).

The technical supervision body of the project is Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The second annual review meeting of the project was conducted at the Browns Beach Hotel, Negombo from December 13-15, 2005.

This meeting included a laboratory and experimental site visit at the Coconut Research Institute.

The project completed two-year period by December 31, 2005. During the meeting the progress of all the countries was evaluated.

The same project is also being conducted in Philippines, Papua New Guinea, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Samoa, Thailand and Tanzania. Further, the work plan and the budget for the third year were approved by CFC after reviewing the progress by the supervisory body.

The four countries which had taken up research on rhinoceros beetle (Philippines and Papua New Guinea) and eriophyid mite (India and Sri Lanka) have made substantial progress.

IPM experiments have also been laid out by all nine countries. Parallel to the research project Farmer Field School (FFS) which is the technology transfer programme was started on all the nine countries and satisfactory progress has been made.

FFS programme was intended to establish direct link with growers and make them understand the problem, get solutions from the experts and implement in their own fields by themselves and finally make growers experts in their own land. Greater interest has been generated this programme by the growers.

All countries are implementing the programme with great interest and enthusiasm. In Sri Lanka, five Farmer Field School programmes have been started in three districts.

Two FFS is at Kurunegala district (Dambedeniya and Alawwa), and one each in Puttalam district (Chilaw) and Anuradhapura district (Rambewa) and last one in Galle district (Ratgama).

The available technologies and the ones developed in this project are transferred to the farmers at their door step through the FFS programme.

The enormous response and high level of farmer participation in FFS programs ensure that at the end of the project period sustainable IPM technologies will be available for large scale adoption which will go a long way to increase productivity of coconut.