Calotropis procera and Annona squamosa: Potential Alternatives to Chemical Pesticides

The control of insect pests in agriculture, forestry, stores, animal husbandry, poultry and in human hygiene are still considered a challenge. Widespread use of chemical pesticides represents a potential risk to human and the environment. Therefore, the search for alternative strategies in pest control is timely to overcome this problem. Desirable are preparations that exhibit new modes of actions and impair processes that are rather specific to the pest in order to be combated. In the last twenty five years, much attention has been devoted to natural pest control agents. One of the most important groups among them are plant based active substances or mixtures of substances commonly known as ‘botanicals’. Such natural products typically occur as cocktails of metabolically related compounds with differing activity/spectrum towards different insects. The present paper is a mini review presenting an updated account of biopesticidal properties of extracts from two different plant species that could be developed as a potential substitute to the chemical pesticides.