WERA_OLD060: Science and Management of Pesticide Resistance
Statement of Issues and Justification
Maintenance of our present food production and public health systems would be impossible without extensive chemical control of agricultural and medical pests. Along with its many benefits, pest control has costs, one of the most pernicious being the evolution of pesticide resistance. Because it is a natural, evolutionary response of a pest population to strong selection pressure, resistance is a phylogenetically and geographically widespread problem that is increasing in magnitude. Resistance to insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, rodenticides, and bactericides poses greater problems than ever before in agriculture and public health. Moreover, the advent of transgenic pesticidal plants has the potential to significantly increase selection pressures for resistance relative to traditional synthetic pesticides. As a consequence, resistance evolution has for the first time become a consideration in the pesticide regulatory process, both in the U.S. and internationally. Proactive resistance management, a requirement of current registrations, has considerable economic implications for agricultural productivity in this country and abroad.There are two dimensions to the increase in resistance problems: the phenomenon itself and our need to respond to it. Our continued reliance on pesticides has caused the number of resistant species and populations to grow dramatically. At the same time, there is an increased awareness of this resistance problem from the regulatory community, industry, and other scientists, creating an enormous demand for expert advice and information.
Like many challenges facing modern agriculture, dealing with pesticide resistance requires interdisciplinary approaches. Resistance research and management demands a threefold attack, with separate disciplines aligned along at least three separate axes. The first axis cuts across taxonomic groups: bacteria, fungi, higher plants, and arthropods. Resistance occurs in all of these, but scientists trained to specialize in one group are all too often ignorant of important developments in another. The second axis extends across levels of organization; ranging from the reductionist to more holistic and integrated ends of the continuum. Successfully dealing with resistance requires efforts at virtually all levels of biological organization, including evolution, population and molecular genetics, biochemistry, physiology, and ecology, as well as contributions from studies of economics, rural sociology, and other disciplines. The third is the basic-applied axis. As in other areas of agricultural research, there is a premium for conducting basic research to maximize the speed and utility of its application to the problems that motivated it in the first place.
Because of the extraordinary demands imposed by this interdisciplinary model, coordinated research, education, and communication on resistance are of urgent importance. In the past twelve years, WCC-060 has fulfilled this role as the only fully interdisciplinary group of academic scientists addressing resistance problems at multiple levels and taxa. The scientists associated with WCC-060 now seek renewal of this Western Coordinating Committee under the following objectives.
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