ABSTRACT
The unexpected consequences of the post-World War II chemo-technology era resulted in the evolution of the technologies eventually called Integrated Pest Management (IPM). During this period, there were only limited direct contacts between Central Asian and Western agricultural scientists. An exception was a bilateral IPM meeting at Michigan State University (MSU) in 1975. After the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the national governments of the newly independent states and international development agencies initiated agricultural research and development programs to enhance local food security and livelihoods. In the late 1990s, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in collaboration with national agricultural research systems established a regional program for agricultural research and development in Central Asia and the Caucasus to enhance the institutional capacity of public research organizations. Many initiatives were launched to break through the isolation and improve food self-sufficiency and livelihood (Babu and Tashmatov, 1999; Babu and Pinstrup-Andersen, 2000). This work comes in the context of challenges to the region’s food security posed by climate change (Sommer et al., 2013) and concerns about the need for increased agro-biodiversity (Giuliani et al., 2011).
