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Goodbye pesticides

Pheromone trap working wonder in Jessore

Reaz Ahmad, Back From Jessore
It is a small chemical capsule in a plastic bottle half-filled with water. But it works wonders -- insects flock to the bottle to drown.
Farmers, who earlier used to apply heavy doses of pesticide in their vegetable fields, now need only this wonder capsule they call 'talisman'.
Scientists call it gheromone -- the female sex ormone of insects -- that attracts the male.
This technology will radically change the use of pesticide in Bangladesh, making vegetables free from toxic elements, they envisage.
Brinjal Shoot and Fruit Borer (BSFB), the pest mainly responsible for damaging 30 to 60 percent of eggplants, has developed almost full resistance against the chemical pesticide applied for its annihilation.
But the new stride forward in crop protection science has finally put survival of the tiny pest at stake.
Over the last two years, many brinjal growers in Jessore, which produces one fifth of the total output of aubergine in Bangladesh, have been doing away with pesticide use and yet having far bigger harvest of brinjal with no pest attacks whatsoever.
Artificial secretion of sex pheromone in brinjal fields is the secret behind the magic. Pheromone is a chemical compound, produced and secreted by an insect or animal, that attracts opposite sex of the same species for mating.
What the scientists and researchers have done in the case of brinjal is that they have artificially produced female BSFB pheromone and put a certain dose of it in the middle of an eggplant field inside low-cost traps to lure the male BSFB for mating. In the process, the tiny pests got eliminated with farmers requiring no use of pesticide.
The 'Sex Pheromone-based Management of BSFB,' a scheme under a DFID-(Department for International Development, UK) aided project of Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (Bari), is now at the final stage of field experiment. The Natural Resources Institute (NRI) of UK, Asian Vegetable Research and Development Centre (AVRDC) of Taiwan and crop science multinational company Syngenta are cooperting in the research, said Dr Syed Nurul Alam, principal investigator of the pheromone project.
Alam, also a senior scientific officer at Entomology Division of the Bari, said the pheromone technology promised to eliminate use of pesticides in brinjal cultivation, saving about one third of the farmers' total expenditure.
Brinjal now tops all cereals and vegetables in terms of per unit pesticide use in Bangladesh.
Official statistics show pesticide use in Bangladesh dates back to 1956-57 when the quantity used stood at around 3,000 tonnes. Over the decades, it rose to 20,000 tonnes now.
Farmers apply only 0.2 litre pesticide per hectare in rice fields, 1.12 litres in vegetable (other than brinjal) fields but 1.41 litres in brinjal fields.
Alam said 98 percent brinjal growers apply toxic pesticides to save eggplant from the BSFB havoc and 60 percent of them apply that 141 times in a six-month season. This also causes strong headache, vomiting and physical weaknesses.
"Though farmers are always advised to stop applying pesticides in brinjal fields at least 7 to 15 days prior to harvesting, they do it even on the day of harvesting to save the vegetable from pest attacks. As a result, the residual effect of pesticides in brinjal poses serious health hazards and a risk of losing export market too," said Alam.
Earlier, farmers had to spend Tk 56,354 a hectare on pesticides for cultivating brinjal in a season but now they will need only Tk 15,000 for pheromones.
Abdul Mannan, a farmer in Boilpur village in Jessore, told this correspondent on Monday, "Earlier 10 to 20 kilograms of brinjal per maund (37.5 kg) were damaged despite use of pesticides. On the advice of Bari scientists, 32 farmers in our area used pheromones, which we got free of cost, in brinjal fields in the last two years. This brought the crop damage to 3-4 kilograms a maund."
Two other farmers from Gaidghat village of Bagharpara upazila --Nazrul Islam Khan and Shantimoy Sen -- said many brinjal farmers in their area got pheromone traps free of cost on an experimental basis for the last two years. But now that the project period ends, they want the government to make that available in the markets.
So long they used to get a tiny capsule of 3 mg pheromone (Pheromone Lure) from the Bari and water-filled polyethylene vial dispensers inside which they used to place the Pheromone Lure. Such a trap catches up to 20 male moths of BSFB a night.
One Pheromone Lure attracts male shoot and fruit borers for two months. When the artificial pheromone secretion loses effectiveness, farmers are to replace it with a new one.