
Click image for caption and other photo
information. Read the
magazine
story to find out more. Beating the
$22 Billion BugBy Kim Kaplan February 7, 2003Eradication of the scourge of the
South--better known as the boll weevil--is now a major success, thanks in large
part to research from the Agricultural
Research Service. The boll weevil wreaked havoc on the American cotton industry, with yield
losses and control costs totaling more than $22 billion since its 1892 arrival
in the United States. As boll weevils spread, they forced radical economic and social changes in
areas that had been almost completely dependent on cotton production. Many
experts consider the boll weevil second only to the Civil War as an agent of
change in the South. For example, the year before boll weevils marched into Georgia in 1915, the
state produced 2.8 million bales of cotton. Ten years later, annual production
was 600,000 bales. By 1983, it was down to 112,000 bales. A decade after
joining the eradication program, Georgia cotton production rebounded to 1.66
million bales in 2000. The Georgia cotton industry, including farms, gins,
warehouses, cottonseed oil mills and textile mills, now provides 53,000 jobs
and an overall economic impact of more than $3 billion each year. There have also been environmental benefits, as eradication has allowed
cotton growers to reduce as many as 15 pesticide applications a season to just
one or two. Today, the boll weevil has been virtually eliminated from more than 6
million acres, and active eradication is in various stages of completion on
more than 9 million additional acres in 17 U.S. states and in northern Mexico.
Hope for stopping the boll weevil had been bleak until the 1970s, when ARS
research began to create needed tools. ARS developed an essential pheromone
lure and trap, along with basic biological information about the pest. Then ARS helped assemble the research--from ARS and from universities, state
experiment stations, extension agents and many others--into an areawide pest
eradication model. The success story of boll weevil eradication was built on cooperation
between government research and regulatory agencies, especially ARS and USDA's
Animal and Plant Health Inspection
Service, which has regulatory responsibility for the eradication
program--along with universities, industry, states and growers. Read more about
it in the Februaryissue of Agricultural Research magazine. ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief research agency. U.S. Department of Agriculture |