'Halting crop destruction in India saves up to USD 1 billion'

India saved over USD 1.3 billion in damage to its papaya, eggplant and tomato crops from a devastating pest after US researchers led by an Indian- American scientist found a natural way to combat the bug.
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.

The papaya mealybug ripped through crops including papaya, eggplant, and tomato in southern India - causing mold and stunted growth - before Rangaswamy 'Muni' Muniappan of Virginia Tech identified the pest and spearheaded the natural control programme.
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.

"The government and farmers tried spraying pesticides, but crop losses kept getting larger. It was clear to us that this was a case not for poisons but for natural, biological controls."

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.

It was found on St. Martin Island in 1995, and by 2000 it had spread to Florida, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. The pest's march continued, taking it to Guam in 2002 and the Hawaiian Islands in 2004. India's problem began in 2006.