Icrisat to set up bio-pesticide research consortium

Partnership with private sector to encourage farmers in using biopesticides

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (Icrisat) is setting up a bio-pesticide research consortium (BRC) in collaboration with the private sector to encourage the farmers in using biopesticides.

William Dar, director-general of Icrisat, said in a press release here today that the institute had initiated the process to set up the consortium in collaboration with the private sector.

The partnership research would validate various protocols for low-cost and commercial-scale production of microbial biopesticides that had been developed at Icrisat. The partnership research would also promote such agricultural practices as to help protect the crops at affordable costs to the farmers.

Dar said that the initial response to the idea of the consortium had been positive from the private sector. The consortium is one of the several public-private sector partnership initiatives of the institute. It had already set up a hybrid parents' research consortium with the private sector seed companies and the experiment had been very successful, he said.

The BRC consortium would produce biopesticides to help the rural poor increase their agricultural productivity. Icrisat will transfer the technologies for the preparation of biopesticides to the private sector companies that would become the members of the consortium. It will also share with the private sector the agricultural practices that can prevent pest attack on crops.

Over the last five years, Dar said, Icrisat has tried and found a protocol for preventing the attack of the pod borer "� Helicoverpa armigera "� on pigeon pea and cotton. For the first four years the trials were held within the Icrisat campus at Patancheru.

In 2003-04, the on-farm participatory trials commenced at Kothapally village in partnership with the scientists of the Acharya NG Ranga Agricultural University and the state department of agriculture. This year's trials are being held at Kothapally and Yellakonda villages.

According to Dar, the technologies for the production of two biopesticides that kill the larvae of Helicoverpa are being fine-tuned. While one uses the bacterium bacillus megaterium (strain BCB-19), the other uses the fungus metarrhizium anisopliae, both developed at Icrisat.

The technology for the production of biopesticide using nuclear polyhedrosis virus, which Icrisat had developed earlier, would also be made available to the BRC consortium, he said.