‘I can solve tomato ebola outbreak’
Mufutau Animashaun is a consultant post-harvest horticulturist with over 40 years experience in preservation and disease control of fruits and vegetables. In this interview with BusinessDay, he speaks about the Tuta Absoluta infestation on tomato crops and how Nigeria can stop the spread of the moth.
Presently, tomato farms in the country are having a holocaust of Tuta-Absoluta, locally known as tomato Ebola. From your profile, you are an experienced consultant on post-harvest pathologist on fruits and vegetables. Can you explain in a simple language what tuta absoluta is, how it attacks vegetables and the precaution needed to stop its spread before the solution arrives?
Tuta-absoluta is an intelligent insect that has a distinctive survival instinct. It’s a pest that destroys tomato crops, which has been prevalent in this country for 50 years, but just discovered few years back. The attention is just coming up now because of the intensity of the attack that is being experienced. It is a soil born pest. Tuta absoluta (Meyrick) is a micro lepidopteran moth belonging to the Gelechiidae family and considered as one of the most devastating pest that feeds on tomatoes, garden egg, potatoes, and tobacco plants.
Tuta absoluta pest spreads very quickly; it has a high reproductive potential and a life cycle that can take between 24 to 76 days, depending on the environmental conditions. Adults are silvery grey with black spots on the forewings. Their activity is concentrated in the early morning and dusk; during the rest of the day they remain hidden among the leaves. Adult lifespan ranges between 10 and 15 days for females and 6–7 days for males. The female lays the eggs mainly on the leaves, although they can also be found on stems and sepals. Eggs are laid isolated, thus facilitating their distribution on the crop.
The number of eggs per female is usually between 40 and 50 and may reach 260. This is just a nominal description of Tuta absoluta and I think we need to deploy different approaches to solving the problem. First is the approach of attacking the insects itself at the reproduction stages from the egg to adult. It’s not about attacking at the point of attack, but killing the egg before hatching, that is, completely wiping it off from our farmland nationwide. We need an Entomologist report to identify the specie of the pest because it’s possible that the specie that can survive in Kano and Kaduna might not survive in Jos and Yola because of the varied temperature.
Another approach is to identify which stage of the lifecycle that attacks and infects the fruits, either the larva, pupa or the adult state because I know that it’s a moth that reproduces twelve times a year and it can be terminated before it matures to age that attacks the fruit. The third is the pesticide method: though some experts have suggested the use of pesticides, we have to be very careful. Some pesticides are systemic; you intend to control the insects but the tomatoes can take it up, and when eaten fresh can be carcinogenic and cause harm to the human body.
Another approach is the biological approach and that is finding parasites that feed on the moth, tuta-absoluta.
What should the government do to have an all-encompassing proactive approach to protecting our food and crops?
The most lacking thing in crop harvest in this country is post-harvest technology, management and packaging- these are very essential and important in any nation’s agricultural growth. This gives the developed economy edge over us, they believe in technology a lot and they spend money on research. You can’t import a technology that was made for a country with different climate to a country that has a very hot climate.
What do you mean sir?
I am unequivocally saying that I can solve this Ebola tomatoes outbreak locally in synergy with other indigenous plant protection experts. We need to look at the post management of these crops, study the physiology of the crops and know when it is mature, using our own technology. The right practice is to harvest the crop when it is physiologically matured and subsequently transferred to a cold room with a specific temperature suitable for the crop.
At what stage?
For example, the tomato has six stages, it is harvested in the second stage, which is the green crop stage, and then it is put in the cold room at a temperature not more than 13degrees centigrade or else the crop would have chilling damage. Every fruit contains a gas called endogenous ethylene; (ethanol) it can be injected too- it hastens ripeness in tomatoes and gives you a very good fresh tomato. Ethylene is a hydrocarbon compound obtained from butane or propane.
Doesn’t ethylene have health effects?
No, it doesn’t, it’s a gas. It is used for ripening process and it increases the shelf life of fruits.
You said your grand mission is to develop a value chain system for horticultural crops, fruits and vegetables in Nigeria. I also believe it is important for our local food security, how do you intend to achieve this?
We are having a collaborative arrangement with a sister institution in the UK. We have a post-harvest unit that is very involved in research and test for most fruits and vegetables for supermarkets in the UK. We carry out the palatability test, aroma, flavour and acceptability by consumers of all these products that come to UK and we send our analyses and results to them.
However, I am back to establish a similar thing in Nigeria where we have post harvest unit in some of our institutions especially in Lagos state where we have land constraint. We have areas where we can locate containerised cold rooms and offer post harvest management and packaging of these crops. This will help them to retain their original freshness and increase their shelf lives.
Do you think cold room facility is affordable for our smallholder farmers, considering the issue of poor power supply in the country?
They can form a co-operative society and have a common cold room where companies can buy from and do all the marketing and other necessary things like post harvest treatment on their own. The farmers would bring their products and at that stage, we call them contract farmers.
In London, where you studied and lived, they practice mechanised farming, most of our farmers are peasant farmers, what do you think should be done here with our technological level?
We have got to a situation where the world is now a global village. Now we practice rain fed agriculture, we also practice open field crop production. Horticulture is not like that, you have green houses protecting horticultural products, and for example, you can have three tomatoes growing under green houses.
So how can you develop this protective technology?
You have some companies that have green houses of short span where you can even drip feed them, by using drip irrigation technology, by putting the right amount of fertilisers in the solution with the right amount of water, consequently, you get good yield from the crop.
With the government preaching patronage of indigenous companies to reduce the further depletion of our foreign exchange what to you think you can do realistically to address the tuta issue?
I read that the honourable minister for Agriculture said that they have contacted Agronet over the issue and that they are going to provide chemicals to combat it. The long-term approach is what I had stated earlier; study the life cycle call in all the entomologists, it is their job and they should have a long-term plan to eradicate it totally. The immediate control is the use of chemicals, which I said is not a sure bet.
The five states affected by the outbreak include Kaduna, Katstina, Kano, Jigawa and Nassarawa. What is your proactive prevention control to avert it from spreading to other states?
We have to do the right thing by being very professional and ethical. Let’s do an entomology test on the different species and use the right approach from the result finding, to contain it so that there won’t be another outbreak in future and not the usual fire brigade approach that is always palliative in nature.