Natural plant products - As protectant during grain storage: A review

Abstract

Since 1960s, natural plant products have been utilized in controlling the insect-pests in the bulk storages. Grain protection gained economic importance from various insect-pest infestations during storage. Integrated pest management is one of the widely adopted pests control strategies that involves various contact and residual insecticides in addition to the fumigants. Today’s major concerns are residue problem and health risks to the consumers that forced synthetic pyrethroids either banned or restricted use. To the most of currently available fumigants and synthetic chemicals pests have developed resistance. Such constraints paved a way to use need based plant derived products as alternatives to current chemical pesticides. The reports have shown plant-derived products to possess great insecticidal potential. Moreover, the biosafety studies of various plant based insecticides should be carried out to ascertain their toxic effects on human, animals and agricultural crops. This paper includes various aspects like storage losses by insect pests, side effects of pesticides as grain protectants, plant products as alternative to synthetic compounds, classification of plant based compounds, powder and oil formulations as grain protectants.