The fruit fly affects more than four thousand tons of mango in the south of the state, causing the crops and their marketing to collapse and leaving producers without better alternatives to address the serious economic losses in the region.

In response to this situation, agricultural technicians of the Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA), in coordination with state authorities for Rural Development, are making a series of assessments to determine how much damage this pest has caused and to find a solution to this problem as soon as possible and before facing total losses.

The leader of the National Peasant Confederation (CNC) of Tamaulipas, Florentino Aaron Saenz Cobos said that one of the reasons they were facing this problem was because, by the end of the harvest, many producers usually left the fruit lying on the ground giving the fly a place to deposit its eggs and for the plague to develop.

Producers and orchard owners were recommended to bury the fruit they find lying on the ground and to cover it with soil and lime.

"A significant amount of mango has been affected, so we can't leave the fruit lying around because it will be used by the fly and the plague will spread more; we have a little over two thousand five hundred hectares of mango throughout the entire southern region of the state, between Mante, Xicoténcatl, Gómez Farías and Llera," he said.

Regarding the mango's trading price, he said it was decreasing, as a box of this product currently costs approximately 60 pesos in the region, "that's why we need to schedule meetings with the authorities involved in the field, in order to find better alternatives and thereby open the domestic market."

Source - http://www.freshplaza.com/