Kenya: Mango farmers make use of biopesticides

In Kenya, small-scale farmers grow thousands of tonnes of mangoes annually, but they are not profiting from the tropical fruits as an overwhelming fruit fly problem means yields are erratic and up to 60% is wasted, making formal contracts next to impossible.

The Guardian reports that the risk of spreading fruit fly to importer countries and traditionally high pesticide usage mean Kenya has been a no-go zone for western mango importers who have other, more reliable, options.

But some of the 60,000 plus producers across the country are starting to reduce their reliance on chemicals and develop alternative controls for fruit fly, in the hope of reaching the quality standards required for western export markets.

Real IPM is a small Kenyan biopesticide company that has developed a pioneering fruit fly control, based on a common insect-killing fungus that occurs naturally in the soil – known as Metarhizium (Met) 69.

With funding from USAid and Rockefeller, co-founder Louise Labuschagne started to develop the business using Met 69 as a way of controlling the fruit fly sustainably. Used as a powder in traps, the fungus infects male and female fruit flies. The flies don’t die immediately, but can exit the trap with enough time to infect others by grooming or mating.

The system can control an entire orchard, providing at least 20 devices are used per hectare, and the fungus is also sprayed onto soil to kill pupae or in tree canopies to catch larger adults.

“Almost all mangoes in Kenya are grown by smallholders who have low numbers of trees,” says Labuschagne. “Lots of farmers aren’t even harvesting because they can’t sell their fruit or manage their orchards, they leave fruit on the ground and it makes it worse. So if you could solve the problem of mangoes, you could increase income for small-scale farmers.”

But exporters need more than just regular yields. In the past, smaller growers primarily sold their mangoes to local markets where residue restrictions for pesticides are much lower than international standards, says Collins Wanyama, who heads up the commercialisation of the Real IPM fruit fly programme. Biopesticides are not chemicals, therefore they do not create any residues.