Faleiro, J.R., M. Ferry, Th. Yaseen and S. Al-Dobai. 2019. Overview of the gaps, challenges and prospects of red palm weevil management. Arab Journal of Plant Protection, 37(2): 170-177. The Red Palm Weevil (RPW) Rhynchophorus ferrugineus Olivier has emerged as a key pest of palms in diverse agro-ecosystems worldwide. RPW has its home in South and SouthEast Asia where it has been a major pest of coconut. Ever since it was reported on date palm in the Middle East during the mid-1980s, it has spread rapidly mainly through infested planting material. Recent reports of RPW invasion suggest that the pest is gaining foot hold in the Caucasian region where it is detected from Sochi in Russia and Abkhazia in the republic of Georgia and also from East Africa in Djibouti. The current RPW IPM programmes, based on pheromone/bait trapping among other techniques have been implemented with limited success. Gaps and challenges in almost all the components of the strategy, particularly with regard to early detection of the pest, developing and implementing phytosanitary measures, lack of farmer participation in the programmes and scarcity of data on socioeconomic issues among several other factors have made RPW control and eradication extremely difficult. On the positive side, the pest has been eradicated in the Canary Islands and is approaching eradication in Mauritania. Eradication has also been obtained in various oasis in Oman but new introductions of infested palms have ruined these successes. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN during the Scientific and High Level Meeting on the Management of RPW in March, 2017 called for the urgent need to combat RPW by collaborative efforts and commitments at the country, regional and global levels to stop the spread of this devastating pest and formulated a framework strategy for eradication of RPW which aims to support efforts/programs of countries to stop its spread, to achieve a strong decline and if possible its eradication. This has led to the 'FAO Programme on RPW Eradication in the NENA Region' to intensify governance, monitoring, scientific research, capacity building and coordination. The program fosters the ongoing research on the applicable approaches of biological control and innovative detection and control methods. Furthermore, the 'FAO Global RPW management platform' aims mainly at monitoring the pest using mobile apps and GIS based techniques. This presentation highlights the gaps and challenges in the current RPW-IPM strategy with prospects for improving each component of the RPW-IPM program, based on a much better knowledge on the socioeconomic situation and the participation of the farmers and other stakeholders.

-Introduction. Plants develop mechanisms that allow them to compartmentalize injuries that they suffer during their life. In trees, pruning and injection treatments must be used in accordance with precise rules to reduce risks resulting from the injuries created. Sealing in palms. Palms, contrary to widespread belief, are quite capable of "healing" injuries (sealing); because of an anatomy quite different from trees, the sealing process in palms is much simpler. Compartmentalization of injection wounds. The controversy on the use of injection in trees is due essentially to initial mistakes that have then been rectified. Injection in palms against the red palm weevil. For palms, for decades, this technique has been employed without problems and with great efficiency against various pests, including Rhynchophorus ferrugineus, the red palm weevil (RPW). Its use has been reserved for exceptional situations either to face abnormal pest proliferation, uncontrollable by other techniques, or to implement eradication programs. Integrated eradication program. In such a program, the main aim of injection treatments is preventive. With long-persistence insecticides, the number of treatments could be greatly reduced. The resulting savings in time and money would enable the organization of the treatments of all the palms located in an infested area, and consequently the rapid eradication of the pest. New perspectives. We established that insecticides applied by injection were capable of protecting palms with only two or even one treatment per year. These results suggest a radical improvement in programs to eradicate RPW, while considerably reducing the risks to health and the environment compared with spray treatments.

Morphological and chemical analyses of mature dates related to the propagation method (traditional vegetative propagation and two different methods of in vitro multiplication) of the date palm are presented. No significant differences were seen among Bou Sthammi noire, Mejhool, Theory, and Zahidi cultivare propagated by traditional methods and by the French Group on Date Palm Research in vitro multiplication technique, based on axillary budding. These results could indicate that the vitroplants conform to mother trees. Of the five cultivare studied, only the Deglet Nour dates, obtained from callus (somatic embryogenesis), showed divergences in sugar and amino acid composition. In this case, Deglet Nour vitroplants contain no sucrose, more glutamic acid, glutamine, -amino-butyric acid, and arginine, and less alanine. We could suppose that variations were introduced by the micropropagation technique.

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