IITA–CGIAR has partnered with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MINADER) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) to release the Fall armyworm (FAW) egg parasitoid Telenomus remus in West Cameroon. The collaborators have been developing innovations to manage FAW in Cameroon.
Through the One CGIAR’s Plant Health Initiative (PHI), the IITA-Cameroon IPM team, led by Komi Fiaboe, has identified several FAW natural enemies under the humid tropical forest and Sudano-Sahelian agroecologies of Cameroon. They established that the egg parasitoid Telonomus remus was the most aggressive, frequent, and widely distributed in farmer fields. Through joint funding of PHI and the FAO-funded Integrated Management Strategy for the Fall armyworm in Central Africa project, the parasitoid was collected from fields and mass-produced in the IITA Cameroon Entomology Laboratory under the leadership of IITA researcher Samuel Nanga Nanga.