Irradiated Fruit Flies: the Secret to Protecting Thailand's Premium Fruit Exports

“Durian and mangosteen have tough skin so the fruit flies can’t penetrate them, but many countries won’t accept any or very few fruits if they know fruit flies are a problem in the growing area or if they detect fruit flies in any stage of their life cycle,” said Suksom Chinvinijkul, Head of the Irradiation for Plant Pest Management Section in the DOAE. “Some countries also ban fruits when they detect an overuse of the chemicals that keep the flies away.”

“After we added sterile flies to our insect control methods, it only took a few years for us to meet export standards and then we started exporting around 300 to 500 tons of fruit per year,” said Preecha Kanayat, Chief of the Trok Nong Subdistrict Agricultural Technology Transfer and Service Center. “Today we’re exporting as much as 4000 tons of high quality fruits each year, and because we don’t need to use pesticides, we are considered eco-friendly and have access to markets we would never have been able to get before.”

Farmers and local government officials in Chanthaburi province first heard about SIT (see Sterile insect technique and area-wide integrated insect pest management) in 2005 from scientists at the Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology (TINT) that were carrying out a research project involving SIT.

In 2013, shortly after the project finished, the DOAE, which is responsible for the practical application of new methods and technologies in agriculture, teamed up with the Joint FAO/IAEA Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture, through the IAEA’s technical cooperation programme, to find new ways to address the fruit fly problem around the country. The DOAE first reached out to the district and then subdistricts’ administrative organizations that helped them approach the local community. Together they set up the area-wide integrated insect pest management (see The Science box) programme in a 2590-hectare area. Farmers now receive 5 000 000 pupae each week from a facility in Pathumthani province about 290 kilometres away.

After each shipment, the farming community works to repackage the pupae into boxes and distribute them so that when the adult flies are ready, they fly out of the boxes and seek out wild females.

The plan is now to expand the buffer zone of the target area by 640 hectares in all directions.

“Fruit flies don’t operate within boundaries. They can fly as far as 30 kilometres. This means that getting a programme to work depends on the farmers in the entire area actively participating in pest management. If just one farmer doesn’t do his or her part, it can jeopardize the whole area,” Chinvinijkul said.

That’s where leaders in the farming community come in. They are using their understanding of local farming culture and their experience with SIT to help the expansion get off the ground.  

“We can talk farmer to farmer and help them see how this programme changed things for us and can change things for them too,” said Hoharn. “My approach is that I tell them the advantages of the programme, like not needing pesticides and how it can help them reach new markets. Then when they ask how it works, I tell them it’s done with radiation. I use X-rays as an example because they know about the good of that in medicine and then they can more easily see how radiation can be used in many good ways.”