The world situation and the main lessons of 30 years of fight against the red palm weevil

Ferry, M. 2019. The world situation and the main lessons of 30 years of fight against the red palm weevil. Arab Journal of Plant Protection, 37(2): 109-118. For the last 30 years, imports and movements inside the countries of infested palms have led to the introduction and the spread of the RPW in all the countries of the NENA region (expected Algeria and Sudan) and in all the countries of the Northern Mediterranean coast. Most of these imports and movements have been officially authorized. In the Mediterranean region, hundreds of thousands of ornamental palms were imported from Egypt between 2000 and 2007. In all the infested countries the programmes to control this pest failed and the present situation is presently very serious with important socio-economic impacts in date producing countries and major landscape damages in places where palms were planted for ornamental purpose. To propose valid and sustainable solutions to control this dreadful pest, it is essential to draw lessons from this widespread failure and from the few cases where the control of this pest was successful. These main lessons are: imports and movement of palms must be forbidden when the shoots measure more than few cm diameter; containment strategy fails if it is not associated with efficient programmes implemented to obtain rapid RPW decline; eradication conceived as a long term objective represents a strategic mistake; with the existing tools, eradication is possible; the paradigm that pest eradication means automatically infested palms eradication is wrong; the main problem is not technical but socio-economic and organizational; socio-economic studies must be urgently realized and participatory approach methods must be implemented to involve the palms owners and their organizations at a large scale in the RPW rapid decline and eradication programmes.