"It's all about the amount of glucose, or sugar, in the plant," Lavine said. "Rice plants with higher glucose levels are older and dying. That increase in glucose causes adolescent brown planthoppers to develop into the long-winged adults. The plant really is telling the insect how to grow."
The last sentence is just bad.
If plants had their way, they'd be telling the insect pests to GTFO from the get-go. The whole point is that plant sugar levels are an inevitable and reliable indicator of host status, with higher [glucose] indicating poor (and deteriorating) host quality. Evolution (in insect pest populations) by natural selection has led to insect populations evolving plastic developmental programs (Stay-or-go, via wing size) in response to that inevitable and reliable signal of deteriorating host quality.