Insects cause substantial losses to agricultural crops each year and require intensive management approaches. Genetic pest management (GPM) has emerged as a viable, non-chemical alternative for managing insect pests. The development of engineered gene drives for agricultural use is promising, though unproven, and has the potential to impact farmers as well as broader socio-ecological systems in several ways. Drawing on lessons from the deployment of other pest control technologies, this paper considers how gene drive insects could intersect with some of the complexities that characterize agricultural systems. The development of gene drives is emerging in a landscape of pest management shaped by past and current approaches, experiences, regulations, public opinion and pest invasions. Because gene drive insects may spread well beyond their release area, stakeholder groups at different spatial scales need to be engaged in decisions about their deployment. This new paradigm both complicates and offers great promise for future pest management efforts.Keywords: genetic pest management; gene drives; complexity; agriculture; interdisciplinary . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/169938 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jul. 28, 2017; 3
IntroductionSince the beginning of agriculture, societies have worked to protect crops from destruction by insect pests (Oerke 2006). Pest control strategies have tracked developments in both technological innovation and knowledge of pest behavior, incorporating mechanical, cultural, chemical, and biological approaches over time. Today, agricultural insect pests in conventional systems are often controlled with synthetic chemicals, combined in some cases with transgenic, insecticidal plants. Although current strategies prevent substantial losses, an estimated 30-40% of staple crops are still lost to the combined impact of insects and plant pathogens, many of which are insect-vectored (Oerke 2006). In addition to limited efficacy, pesticides are a suboptimal solution due to potential impacts on beneficial organisms, the evolution of resistance in insect populations, association with negative human health outcomes, and the economic burden placed on producers by the necessity of routine applications. Addressing some of these ecological and social concerns, genetic approaches to pest control have emerged as non-chemical alternatives for managing insect populations. Informed by the principles of evolutionary biology, genetic pest management (GPM) harnesses the mechanisms of genetic inheritance in sexually reproducing insect species to achieve either population suppression (the local elimination of a pest species or reduction in its population to below economically-relevant levels) or population replacement (the replacement of individuals in a population with non-pestilent variants) (Curtis 1985;Robinson 1998). This paper consi...