Peru's Senasa promotes biopesticides and grants ‘Green Certificate’

Date:07-02-2020

By Leonardo Gottems, reporter for AgroPages

The National Agrarian Health Service of Peru (Senasa) is promoting the use of biological control agents ACB to make pest control more sustainable in prioritized crops such as vines, cocoa, sugar cane, avocado, citrus, asparagus, coffee and others.

Linked to the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation of Peru (Minagri), Senasa, has trained more than 10,536 people in the last five years promoting courses on the use of insects, mites and beneficial microorganisms for the control of agricultural pests. Besides, in this period, 79,921 people have attended lectures by Senasa on their uses and benefits on different crops.

In the Ica region, farmers use parasitoids, predators and fungi to control the mealybug pest in vine cultivation. In Cusco, they face the Carmenta spp or cocoa pod, a flying insect that pierces the cob, and with the application of beneficial fungi they attack the "witch's broom", another disease that affects cocoa plants. Farmers in Piura and Junín conduct trials using fungi and beneficial nematodes to control the African giant snail in its first weeks of life.

Senasa grants a “Green Fund Certification” to those who implement Biological Control, whose crops produce food for national consumption free of agrochemicals. Likewise, it certified 2,098 evaluators of pests and biological controllers, who in theoretical and practical sessions recognize and evaluate pests that damage crops of economic importance and learn which agent is present in their fields and decide on the management of their pests according to the previous evaluation that they carried out.

Between 2015 and 2020, Senasa treated 500,539.87 hectares with different biological controllers, through the Biological Control Subdirectorate, and worked to control the different pests in crops of economic importance with the support of 60 production laboratories in agreement at the national level.

In 2019-2020, 625 users interested in the breeding and production of biological controllers were trained thanks to agreements with private companies and state institutions that serve crops for national and export consumption such as corn, potatoes, rice, beans, citrus, asparagus, avocado, blueberry, artichoke and vine.