Increasing Importance of Product
Quality
Food-safety issues and the increased aware-
ness of the consumer of the importance of
safe and healthy food have put pressure on
farmers and growers to certify their pro-
duce. A group of European supermarkets
has developed a certification scheme, which
is currently known as the EUREPGAP
guidelines. Also European legislation puts
the final responsibility for food safety at the
farmer level. As a result, farmers increas-
ingly request their suppliers to certify the
quality of their products. They not only
want to be assured that the supplied prod-
ucts contain the stated numbers and that
the organisms are sufficiently fit but also
that no potential pests or diseases are trans-
ferred on to their crop through releasing
natural enemies.
Growers tend to organize themselves
more and more in grower groups and coop-
eratives, and the average size of greenhouse
operations has grown substantially over the
past decade. These larger growers or
grower groups increasingly use their buy-
ing power to assure optimal quality of all
their supplied products and services. In
case of defective quality, litigation is
another instrument growers increasingly
use to assure product quality.
Another development is that, from time
to time, suggestions have been made by
governments or others that efforts should
be put into regulation of the quality of nat-
ural enemies. It is clear that it is a general
legal requirement that the numbers of
organisms supplied should equal or exceed
the number stated on the label and invoice
(Penn et al., 1998), but other characteristics
to be put into a framework of regulation
are still under discussion. Several countries
already apply a system for regulating the
import and release of natural enemies (see
Chapter 13 for a description of the state of
affairs).
When supplying precious products with a
limited shelf-life in such a highly competi-
tive market, product quality could become
an important competitive advantage.
History
The first publication about quality control in
commercial mass-reared natural enemies
appeared in the 1980s (van Lenteren, 1986).
In 1980 the International Organization for
Biological and Integrated Control of Noxious
Animals and Plants (IOBC) created the
global working group ‘Quality Control of
Mass-reared Arthropods’. This working
group focused largely on quality issues and
techniques for large governmental facilities,
where arthropods are used for region- or
nationwide eradication programmes, using
sterile-insect techniques. The fifth workshop
of this global IOBC working group in
Wageningen, The Netherlands, in 1991 led to
a sequence of workshops funded by the
European Union and in collaboration with
IOBC (see Chapter 1 for details), during
which European commercial producers and
scientists together developed a set of practi-
cal quality control guidelines and standards
for 20 different natural enemies.
The resulting guidelines quickly became
known as the ‘IOBC guidelines’ (van
Lenteren, 1994). They include both quality
control method descriptions (further called
‘guidelines’) and prescribed minimum qual-
ity standards for various biological parame-
ters (further called ‘standards’). The IOBC
guidelines specify an easy method for
checking the quantity of natural enemies
per unit and testing qualitative characteris-
tics, such as emergence rate, mortality, sex
ratio, longevity, fecundity, adult size, preda-
tion/parasitization rate and flight activity
in the laboratory.
After the grant from the European Union
expired, the International Biocontrol
Manufacturers Association (IBMA), an asso-
ciation of mainly European-based commer-
cial producers, organized a workshop in
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in September
2000 to further the work of the IOBC work-
ing group. In 1990 the Association of Natural
Biocontrol Producers (ANBP), an association
of mainly North American-based commer-
cial producers, started to develop their own
set of quality control guidelines, which are
largely based on the IOBC guidelines (see216 K.J.F. Bolckmans