Control of the Sweet Potatoweevil in Puerto Rico1

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Abstract
The most serious impediment to the development of a commercial, large-scale sweet potato industry in Puerto Rico is the sweet potatoweevil, Cylas formicarius elegantulus (Sum.). Until a few months ago, sweet potato tubers originating in Puerto Rico could not legally be imported into the United States (Federal Horticultural Board Quarantine No. 30), although other fruits and vegetables from Puerto Rico entered under inspection and certification. Even for local consumption, the public was forced to accept the very poorest and most indigestible kind of tubers because they were least liable to be weevil-infested. The fine flavored, orange or pink fleshed, non-fibrous varieties of sweet potato which are most desirable for human food could not be grown commercially because they are so greatly preferred by the weevils. And of even the inferior varieties, infestation becomes more pronounced the longer they are left unharvested in the field: the subsistence farmer's primitive method of storage. Unpromising and indeed almost hopeless as the situation seemed, the need for additional commercial crops, to, in part at least, take the place of sugar-cane, made imperative the solution of this problem.

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