The phytosanitary situation in certain African countries has recently deteriorated due to unforeseen outbreaks of some pests. These sudden outbreaks caught most plant protection services unawares and ill prepared to face the plague. The case of Burundi is the most glaring example. This country is currently trying to handle outbreaks, bordering on an epidemic scale, with the barest minimum means. The pests include the armyworms Spodoptera exempta, the sweet potato leaf caterpillar Acraea acerata and Hippotion celerio, the variegated grasshopper Zonocerus variegatus, as well as the beetle Aspidomorpha spp.

This country, already facing other social problems, can not handle these phytosanitary problems single-handedly, and is therefore in need of assistance in order to avoid dire consequences as hunger, which is usually a cause of sociopolitical instability. The international community must intervene here by assisting the plant protection services of this country to control the outbreaks. Not only is this kind of assistance less costly and less spectacular, it also does not hurt the people's dignity and it saves human lives, while at the same time protecting the environment. We might also recommend this kind of assistance for social conflict prevention mechanisms...

In the same vein, the whitefly (Aleurotrahelus atratus) whose outbreak was reported in the Indian Ocean Islands such as the Comoros, in one of our recent issues (BIP N° 47), is still wreaking havoc in coconut tree plantations, fragilizing the already weak economies of those countries which depend on this crop.

We present in this issue the organization of the quarantine service of Cape Verde and the phytosanitary situation in the Seychelles, with their melon fly eradication programme, which is in the implementation phase.

Elsewhere, Persistent Organic Pesticides (POPs), subject of the Stockholm Convention, continue to count victims (birth of monster babies, blood cancer, penis size reduction, etc.) all over the world, especially in Africa, in spite of the ratification of this convention by many African countries. Yet this convention has been in force, and thus applicable, in all countries since October 2001.These pesticides continue to enter Africa for a number of reasons, justified or not (health, agriculture, environment, etc.), with the active or passive complicity of certain officials in charge of the management of this sector in their various countries. It is for this reason that the international community, especially civil society (NGOs and others), is increasingly mobilizing, under the aegis of the International POP Elimination Network (IPEN), backed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and organizing a number of manifestations all over the world, including Africa (about 400 NGOs in 70 countries). In this issue, we revisit some of these events as well as some of the damages caused by POPs. Life at IAPSC during this period was marked by movement of scientific personnel, which saw the departure, on transfer, of a phytopathologist, and the arrival of another phytopathologist and an entomologist.

Dear readers, you will also find in this issue some other phytosanitary information that we deemed of interest to you. We hope that some of this information will meet your expectations ; if not, then we promise to redouble our efforts to improve future issues of your Phytosanitary News Bulletin... Click on PDF file below

The Editor B. Bouato