LUBILOSA

During its 13-year life (November 1989 to December 2002), the programme identified an isolate of an entomopathogenic fungus belonging to the genus Metarhizium and virulent to locusts, and went through all the necessary steps to develop the commercial biopesticide product Green Muscle based on its spores.

IIBC requested and obtained the collaboration of the former Biological Control Centre for Africa in Cotonou, Benin, that was owned and managed by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).

When IIBC asked for financial support from the Dutch Directoraat Generaal voor Internationale Samenwerking (DGIS: Directorate General of International Cooperation), DGIS contributed by paying for a Dutch locust expert based at the Département de Formation en Protection des Végétaux (DFPV: Department of Crop Protection Training) of the AGRHYMET Regional Centre (ARC) in Niamey, Niger, which is part of the Comité permanent Inter-états de Lutte contre la Sécheresse dans le Sahel (CILSS: Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel).

Permanent collaboration was established with the crop protection agencies of Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Senegal and The Gambia.

[3] Usually, fungi are most active under moist conditions and in early attempts to use them as control agents, they were therefore applied in water formulations.

When interest in microbial control was revived, water formulations of fungi started to be used successfully in greenhouses, but the results in open fields continued to disappoint.

[4] During the first phase of LUBILOSA, the technical feasibility of using such oil formulations against locusts was demonstrated in the laboratory, then field cage and "arena" trials.

[10][11] Contacts were made with several internationally renowned biopesticide producers to ascertain whether they would be able and willing to reliably meet LUBILOSA's spore requirements during phase 3, but none were able to make that commitment.

The facility proved an excellent research unit and made it possible to refine realistic technical specifications and to test production, contamination control, spore separation, drying and packaging.

Measurements of body temperatures in the field have shown that the basking behaviour reduces the time available for growth by many hours per day.

So even if Metarhizium does not kill before or shortly after fledging, it usually allows the formation of only a single egg pod and thereby reduces the fecundity of infected females.

[citation needed] During phase 3, the programme started investigating the environmental impact of the chosen Metarhizium isolate (IMI 330189).

Standard toxicological tests carried out by certified laboratories showed that the strain had practically no effect on mammals, birds and fish (e.g. LD50 for rats >2000 mg active ingredient per kg of body weight).

The available studies indicate that under natural conditions, the isolate only infects species belonging to the Acrididea and the domesticated silk worm Bombyx mori.

Various aspects of quality control are important, including: levels of contamination (especially the absence of human pathogens), virulence to target pests, particle size spectrum and, not least, viable spore count.

Extensive research was carried out on optimising storage of spores, which should be dry (<5% moisture content) and ideally be maintained under cool conditions.

These were Biological Control Products (BCP) near Durban, South Africa, and Natural Plant Protection (NPP) of Noguères, France (part of Calliope S.A.).

The former registered the product under the name Green Muscle (deposited by CAB International), first in South Africa and subsequently in other southern and eastern African countries.

NPP, however, only obtained a temporary sales permit for the CILSS countries in West Africa, but was unable to produce Green Muscle using its own production process.

At the end of the programme in December 2002, the LUBILOSA collaborators faced a situation where commercial uptake of Green Muscle was still non-existent, all quantities purchased so far exclusively for trial purposes.

It was demonstrated that application of both products together, each at a quarter of its registered dose, caused mortality almost as quick as lambda-cyhalothrin alone and maintained low population levels for weeks, and all this at a much lower cost.

The information about Green Muscle had remained stuck at the professional level of the crop protection agency of Senegal (and most likely other countries as well), notwithstanding all the efforts of LUBILOSA and PRéLISS to make the new product widely known.

Couasnet found the LUBILOSA website, which was still hosted by IITA and maintained by the then project leader of PRéLISS, Christiaan Kooyman.

It took a while to start up the production and get rid of all sources of contamination, but this was eventually achieved with the backstopping of IITA, CAB International and Roy Bateman of IPARC, who installed a large-scale version of the 'MycoHarvester'.

For the following four years, production and marketing were taken care of by the Fondation Agir pour l'Education et la Santé, of which Viviane Wade was president.

[31] registered in Switzerland with subsidiaries in France, Morocco, Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Kenya, decided to develop a new product, NOVACRID, based on a different strain of M. acridum.