The brown planthopper (BPH), Nilaparvata lugens (Stål), and whitebacked planthopper (WBPH), Sogatella frucifera (Horváth), are the rice monophagous species, which are inevitably associated with rice agriculture in Asia. In the 1970s, BPH suddenly occurred as the most preeminent insect pest of rice and threaten the green revolution in the tropical Asia. The BPH outbreaks in Southeast Asia were caused by disruption of ecological balance between BPH and natural enemies by insecticides, which were accepted as a technical component to ensure the high-yielding output of high-yielding varieties (HYVs) in the tropical paddy ecosystems. The outbreaks in India are primarily attributed to disruption of coevolutional interactions between BPH and local rice plants in the monsoon-prevailing paddy ecosystems by abrupt replacement of BPH-resistant traditional rice varieties with susceptible exotic HYVs by the high-yielding varieties program. Unsuccessful deployment of BPH-resistant IR varieties was critically reviewed in relation to the standardized seedbox screening test (SSST), which had been exclusively used to breed BPH-resistant IR varieties. Sixteen of 19 IR varieties incorporated with the Bph1 and bph2 genes were easily defeated with emergence of adaptive BPH biotypes so that their sequential releases could not stop BPH outbreaks. Only a few varieties such as IR36 and IR64 were found to have durable field resistance to BPH even after breakdown of their monogenic resistance. Field performance of IR36 and IR64 indicated that they have some other resistance traits that cannot be evaluated by the SSST. Incapability to evaluate field resistance traits commits a risk of insidious erosion of those traits during the process of SSST-dependent breeding. That could be a reason for a tentative resistance in most of the BPH-resistant IR varieties. WBPH outbreaks in Punjab plain, prevalence of WBPH and WBPHvectored new virus disease in China and Vietnam, and ovicidal resistance to WBPH in japonica rice were referred with special reference to the wind-borne massive displacement biology of WBPH in the active monsoon rice areas.K. Sogawa (*) 429-42 Kamiyokoba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0854, Japan