Africa battles the ‘Ebola of tomatoes’

30 Oct, 2016 - 00:10 0 Views
Africa battles the ‘Ebola of tomatoes’

The Sunday Mail

A few months ago, the media in Nigeria reported that a state of emergency had been declared in the tomato sector of Nigeria’s Kaduna State. A moth called the tomato leaf miner or tuta absoluta had ravaged about 80 percent of tomato farms. The ravaging of the tomato farm by the leaf miner triggered the basket price of tomatoes from US$1,20 to US$4.

Reports indicated that renowned business executives of Nigeria like Aliko Dangote, who also owns a tomato paste manufacturing business, were forced to stop production temporarily. While this desolation was happening in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, Zambia has not been an exception from the leaf miner, especially this year.

The moth has silently been wreaking havoc in most small-scale tomato farms in the country. The challenge for the Zambian local farmer has been to understand what exactly has hit them and their tomato fields as the spraying of insecticides, pesticides and fungicides have in most cases proved to be ineffective.

Even the time when local tomato prices sky rocketed to a record K350 per box, it was unclear what had pushed up the cost of the red vegetable. One local prominent farmer in Chisamba area had four hectares of his seven-hectare tomato field ravaged by the pests. The advice to the farmer by local agronomists was to get rid of the entire infected area of four hectares so as to protect the other three hectares that was not infected. The tomato crop was already at its flowering and fruit stage.

Another farm on the Ndola-Mufulira Road was recently ransacked by the tomato borer (tuta absoluta), leaving two hectares of tomatoes with a short harvesting lifespan than projected. To date, a number of local farms have been attacked by the Leaf Miner and farmers are desperately trying to understand what is causing them not to yield desired results from their tomato farms.

With a loss of hundreds of tomato hectares around the country, it was inevitable that the vegetable would fetch more on the local market. The pest, which has earned itself an infamous nickname — the Ebola of tomato — is considered to be one of the most devastating tomato pests. It was detected for the first time in Europe, particularly in Spain in 2006 and since then, it has continued to spread very quickly along the Mediterranean Basin and to other central, northern European and African countries.

Research conducted by the Office of International Research, Education and Development, showed that African countries, like Sudan, Niger, Senegal and Ethiopia had their tomato fields ravaged in 2012 by the same moth. The successive year, Ethiopia, one of the most affected countries with the tuta absoluta pest at the time, organised an international workshop to meet the challenge of the tomato leaf miner.

The research also predicted that Tuta Absoluta would continue spreading through west and central Africa downwards in the coming years. When the pest was detected in Spain in the first year of introduction, pesticides were applied 15 times per season and the cost went up by 450 euros per hectare.

It is also estimated that when tuta absoluta invades the rest of the world, the tomato pest management cost will go up by US$500 million per year. By the year 2009, the world’s production of tomatoes was about 152 million tonnes with a production area of 4,4 million hectares. The top 10 tomato producing countries at the time were China, US, India, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Iran, Spain, Brazil, and Mexico.

In 2011, tuta absoluta infested 1m hectares of tomato cultivated area (22 percent of cultivated surface). Again today, the pest is a threat to Asia and Africa — including Nigeria, which has five percent of tomato cultivated in the world.

As stated by a training paper by the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology, tomato plants can be attacked from seedlings through to mature plants and in severely infested tomato crops, the leaf miner may cause yield losses of up to 100 percent. The main damage is produced on the leaves and on the fruits.

Research has revealed that the moth has a high reproductive potential and a life cycle that can take from 24 to 76 days, depending on environmental conditions. To control the pest effectively, it is critical to combine all available control measures, including cultural methods, biological control agents and the correct use of registered pesticides.

However, because, tuta absoluta has high reproduction capacity and short generation cycle, the pest is likely to develop resistance to insecticides. This risk increases significantly when management of the pest relies exclusively on chemical control with a limited number of effective insecticides available.

This situation usually leads to an increase in the frequency of use and thus, increased selection pressure for resistance. To avoid potential crop damage, it is very important to detect symptoms early and especially the eggs or small galleries. Chemical control of the pest is especially difficult because the larvae live inside leaves, fruits and stems.

Therefore, it is crucial to avoid systematic applications and only apply treatments according to pest population density and crop damage following the recommendations of professional advisers. It is also essential to alternate the use of active substances with different modes of actions. — Times of Zambia.

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