Cotton Production and Problems - Introduction

In the late 1970's, I worked for the now long-defunct Boots Agrochemicals, based in Nottingham, U.K., as Senior International Development Officer concerned with the final pre-marketing stages of testing and evaluating new products and new product uses in countries outside the United Kingdom.

This narrative is a brief and not over-detailed account of some of the field work which I personally carried out for the evaluation of the product amitraz as an insecticide for use in cotton pest protection. As the trials were commercially sensitive, detailed results were not allowed to be published, although broad summaries were released some time after the author had moved on to other things. Here, I have appended the reports in an edited form as I think they have merit for anyone wishing to learn something of how field trials are carried out.

This main part of the presentation, however, is a series of visual images of the crop, its pests and diseases, and of crop protection techniques. It is not intended to be an in-depth technical text, as those are available to the professional.

Almost all the photographs were taken by me, using a standard 35 mm single-lens reflex camera. The close-up images of insect life stages were taken using extension tubes.

My thanks go to the colleagues who worked with me at the time, notably Jim Bell, John Burgess and Bob Forsyth, and the many people who either directly or indirectly helped me in their own countries of El Salvador, Colombia and Sudan. In all of my work, I never met with anything other than courtesy and helpfulness from all, and have no bad memories of places with sometimes less than happy reputations.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for those at home who failed to appreciate the efforts of those they purported to manage. Those two people, through their selfishness and lack of real vision, led to the demise of genuinely good teams of staff and the ultimate disappearance from the agrochemicals industry of what had become a company with a reasonable reputation, in line with that of the parent company, still a household name in the UK.

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