Predicting Pests: A History of International Plant Pest Reporting and Risk Analysis

Abstract

This thesis explores how plant protection experts have tried to work together across national borders to anticipate, and thus prevent, invasive pest problems in agriculture, largely focusing on developments since World War II. It shows how these experts characterised pest invasion as an international issue that could only be addressed through international cooperation. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations served as a hub for much of this work, bringing together representatives from national and regional plant protection organisations. Plant protection experts understood the term ‘pests’ to include anything that harmed plants of concern, from insects to nematodes, bacteria, viruses, fungi, rodents, and (by the end of the century) weeds. Their e"orts to predict and pre-empt pest invasion drew on contemporaneous attempts to better measure and forecast the damage that domestic pests did to crops, and it took shape through the creation of an international pest reporting system (1952–1994) and the development of international standards for pest risk analysis (c. 1980s–2000s). A new kind of transnational cooperation emerged in the 2000s when new actors and institutions—botanic gardens and arboreta—were brought into surveillance systems intended to assist with pest risk analysis.