PATTAYA – The Chonburi Agricultural Technology Center for Plant Protection plans to combine a new pesticide with another wave of wasps to end a maggot plague that has destroyed 80 percent of the province’s coconut crop.
Prasong Prapaitrakul, deputy director-general of the Department of Agricultural Extension, hosted the June 28 media presentation about the center’s new strategy to battle the black-headed coconut maggot, which has devastated this year’s coconut harvest.
Prasong said the government has allocated 287 million baht to battle the plague and is now betting on a combo of a chemical that poses no harm to crops and a larger release of Bracon wasps.
There have been several wasp releases in the past year, but the success rates were considered low, due, farmers complained, to maggots outnumbering the wasps.
Researchers disputed the cause of failure, however, saying it wasn’t the number of maggots, but their resistance to the wasp’s larvae.
Braconidae wasps lay eggs directly on the maggots and their larvae feed on the pest to grow, simultaneously killing the maggot. However, the current swarm of black-headed maggots has been slow to die.
Now, crops will be sprayed with a new chemical to weaken the bug’s immune systems, greatly improving the wasps’ efficacy, agricultural experts predicted.
The new pesticide-insect combo will be tested in 29 provinces.
