Fruit Fly Control doesn’t Stop at National Borders

The Joint Division proposed an initiative that focused on an area-wide approach – including use of SIT, where necessary – to establish pilot areas of low-pest prevalence. The initiative also called for cooperation among governments, fruit growers and international organizations in Central America.

The project, launched in 2001 with the support of the Joint Division, offered a complete technical package. Growers first of all learned to measure the size of the fruit fly populations in their fields and adjacent areas and how to suppress the populations with measures other than SIT as part of an integrated pest management approach. They also learned the appropriate steps for successful SIT application, how to monitor and measure the resulting levels of insect prevalence, how to establish database methods for proving they actually had achieved low prevalence and how to inform the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) of their results. Finally, they learned how to negotiate their potential export agreements with importing countries.

The project also invited a major importer, the United States, to check the pilot areas established in the different countries where the work was underway and to participate in outlining work plans for export. This ended up enabling the countries to move immediately into exporting their produce because the USA was able to validate the results and the pilot areas became the basis for actual import-export agreements.

Although common practice in international trade called for proving that export areas were pest free, as early as 1995, the WTO had broached the idea that “low” pest prevalence in the field might have the same mitigation of risk as pest-free areas. In 2001, when the project started, the Joint Division experts working on the pilot projects were aware that the IPPC was in the process of preparing a standard for fruit fly areas of low prevalence, anticipated that the phytosanitary rules might change in the middle of the project and prepared for it. Thus in 2008, when the IPPC issued the standard allowing “low-pest prevalence for fruit flies”, the Joint Division’s Central America project already had been working in that direction for several years.

When the pilot project ended in 2007, the Joint Division enhanced these activities throughout the region, in two or three locations per country, aiming toward establishing low prevalence areas. As a result, import-export arrangements have been set up, and private sector entrepreneurs are investing in tropical fruit and vegetable production, growing their size and hiring more rural workers. In most cases, 80 percent of the workers are women who work in the processing, packing and quality control areas, and 20 percent are men who work in the field. At the same time, other support industries are springing up, such as fresh fruit and vegetable packing and transport companies, thus ensuring local growers can meet the increased export demands that have resulted from meeting the low pest prevalence standard.