Management of Arthropod Pests of Agriculture in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

Abstract

AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGIST • Summer 2004 Located more than 5,000 km west of Hawaii, the Marianas are among the most distant of the U.S.-affiliated islands in the Pacific. The Mariana Islands were taken from the Japanese by U.S. forces in 1944 in some of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific. The Northern Mariana Islands—all of the islands except for Guam—were administered as a Trust Territory by the United States until 1978, when they became a U.S. commonwealth. In 1986, the indigenous islanders—Chamorros and Carolinians—became U.S. citizens. Many federal programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to protect and support U.S. agriculture are established in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). These include the U.S. Cooperative Extension Service, which is administered through Northern Marianas College (NMC). I worked as an agricultural entomologist for the Cooperative Extension Service in the CNMI in 2001. The U.S. Cooperative Extension Service is established at land grant institutions in each of the former Trust Territories of the Pacific. In addition to the CNMI, these include the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Management of Arthropod Pests of