Mangoes are an important smallholder and commercial crop in Vietnam, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, and one of the most important commercial crops in northern Australia. To achieve good yields with top quality fruits, mango growers rely on regular pesticide applications. This leads to increased costs, the reduction of natural predators and parasitoids that help control the insect pests, increased pest resistance to insecticides, pesticide residues in the fruits and environmental pollution.
Green ants are efficient predators of a wide range of insect pests in many tropical fruit crops and they are abundant and widely distributed in Southeast Asia. Previous work in Indonesia and preliminary results from cashew crops in northern Australia indicate that green ants can control some of the main pests of mangoes.
Experiments in a mixed-cropping mango orchard using the ants together with limited applications of insecticides indicate that an integrated pest management (IPM) model for mango orchards can be constructed. Since Vietnam, Thailand and Australia all share similar insect pests of mangoes there exists common ground for research involving the three countries.
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