The Minister of Agriculture, Angel Estevez, said yesterday that the eradication of the Mediterranean fruit fly, the bug that caused the United States to ban imports of several Dominican products, was in its final stage.
The official said they were working based on a protocol and national and international experts, enabling to advance greatly to address the problem.
He stated that, as part of the actions, an aircraft would come from Miami to release an initial 40 million sterile male insects followed by 120 million sterile male insects per week for a while. These insects will find the females, mate with them so that they lay infertile eggs.
Estevez said the females only had a life cycle of 22 days. "The fly dislikes cold temperatures. It only eats from 6:00 to 10:00 and then hides," Estevez said, revealing the knowledge he had on the pest.
He estimated that they would start releasing sterile males in about 15 days and that in the meanwhile they would continue capturing females with different traps, which do not attract males.
In mid-March this year, the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the United States announced a ban on imports of 18 products from the Dominican Republic, including some that are not produced commercially in the country. The list, which only affects about four items directly, included avocados, sapote, grapefruit, tangerine, orange, lemon, papaya, tomato, bell peppers, tangerines, litchis, pear (cactus fruit), longan fruit, and mango. The latter can be important after being subjected to a special healing process.
Closing a gap
"There wasn't a structure for the rapid detection of pests of this type here, as we only had about 250 traps installed at the ports and airports and it's possible we weren't rigorously complying with the established protocols, such as reviewing the traps every week," acknowledged Angel Estevez yesterday.
To date there are 10,000 traps installed, but, due to the country's area, there should be at least 12,000 traps. Angel Estevez said there was a significant amount of traps in the process of being placed. "In average we are checking 80% of the traps nationwide every week. In the area of the outbreak, in Punta Cana, we have 5,000 traps installed," he said.
To solve the problem, there are 350 people working every day, said Estevez to the editor of El Caribe newspaper, Osvaldo Santana, in an interview with Hector Linares, deputy editor of the Business section, Hector Marte, managing editor of Apertura, and Sandra Guzman, editor of the newspaper's digital version.
Source: cdn.com.do