This overview and synthesis of the papers presented in this Special Issue suggests that there is a remarkably rich set of ethical issues having direct relevance to the development and practice of biological control for the management of agricultural pests. The perception and resolution of...

The potential negative impacts of biological pest control on non-target species have become the focus of a contentious debate. In this article, we use examples from both classical and augmentative biological control of fruit fly pests in Hawaii to address several important factors in assessing...

Of the four types of biological control, (1) natural, (2) conservation, (3) augmentation, and (4) importation), ethical concerns have been raised almost exclusively about only one type: importation. These concerns rest largely on fears of extinction of animal species. Importation biological...

The 1989 collapse of trade relations with the former socialist bloc plunged Cuba into an economic and food crisis. Cuban farmers, scientists, and planners have responded with alternative agricultural technology to make up for imported food and Green Revolution inputs that are no longer...

Social policies are used to regulate how members of a society interact and share resources. If we expand our sense of community to include the ecosystem of which we are a part, we begin to develop an ethical obligation to this broader community. This ethic recognizes that the environment has...

Rabbits are a major vertebrate pest in New Zealand. An application has been made recently to import and release in New Zealand the biological control agent Rabbit Calicivirus Disease (RCD). In this paper we discuss the findings from a qualitative study and a national survey of New Zealanders'...

Testing of candidate biological control agents to estimate their likely field host ranges in the area of release has been part of weed biological control for several decades, with evolving techniques and goals. Similar efforts have been made less often for parasitoids and predators being...

Multiple sectors within U.S. crop industries - - -growers, elevators, handlers/shell- ers, processors, distributors, and consumers - - -are affected by aflatoxin contamination of commodities, and have the potential to control it using methods developed at both the pre- and postharvest levels....