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Pest management for cotton ecosystems or ecosystem management for cotton protection?

Cotton, as a commercial crop has gone through subsistence, ecological, exploitation, crisis and disaster phases of pest management, with insecticides on focus at the later three stages. Restructuring of pest-management strategies during the last few decades under the banner of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) or Insecticide Resistance Management (IRM)continued to give considerable and selective preference respectively, to the insecticides. Such an approach could only achieve the short-term benefits of reducing the pesticide usage and improving the profit accrued by the farmers. Currently, the transgenic cotton hybrids with myriad genes, singly or in combination, have added preventive power against bollworms, and their cultivation in terms of area coverage has shown a steep upward trend since the commercialization of the technology. (Correspondence)

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