ABSTRACT
From plantation days when naturalist Hans Sloane first recorded the Jamaican citrus root weevil Exophthalmus vittatus L. (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) in 1725 to the 1970s, most research on plant protection in the Caribbean was restricted to recording and describing crop pests and their outbreaks. The notable exceptions to this trend have been the excellent work done on sugarcane pests by the Caroni Sugarcane Research Institute in Trinidad and the Sugarcane Research Institute in Jamaica. The Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, founded in Trinidad in 1921, did not have much impact on insect pest control research in the region. This trend continued even when the college became the Faculty of Agriculture of the newly founded University of the West Indies (UWI) in 1962. At about the same time, a laboratory of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, London, England was set up in Trinidad and two regional organizations – the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI) and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA) funded by various international agencies – became active in different countries of the Commonwealth.
