Virginia Tech researchers who first discovered a devastating pest in south India and devised a natural way to combat it have now put an economic value on their counterattack: up to USD 309 million the first year and more than USD 1 billion over five years.
That is the amount of damage the papaya mealybug would have wreaked on farmers and consumers in India without scientists' intervention, Virginia Tech University said in a press release.
For a relatively modest cost of USD 200,000 during the first year of the intervention, devastation that would have totaled from USD 524 million to USD 1.34 billion over five years was prevented, Muniappan and other scientists report in the February issue of the journal Crop Protection.
"India's first efforts to eradicate the papaya mealybug failed," says Muniappan, who heads up Virginia Tech's federally funded Integrated Pest Management Innovation Lab programme, a venture that works in developing countries to minimise crop losses, increase farmer income, and decrease pesticide use.
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The winning intervention centered on three natural enemies of the mealybug that the US government first employed in Florida after the pest spread there in the late 1990s, three parasitic wasps from Mexico. The wasp lays its eggs inside the mealybug larvae, and when the eggs hatch, the young wasps eat the larvae.
Scientists first identified the papaya mealybug in Mexico, where natural enemies kept it under control, according to the research paper.