By Ross Korves
Ten years after citrus greening was discovered in
Florida in 2005, the citrus industry is ready to field test a potential
solution. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved an
Environmental Use Permit (EUP) application under the Federal Insecticide,
Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) for Southern Gardens Citrus (SGC) to
conduct large scale tests of citrus plants with a protein derived from spinach
that appears to help control the disease. SGC President Rick Kress noted
in a news release that a final solution to eliminating this disease may still
take years.
The EPA website has the following general
explanation about EUPs. “EPA requires that a pesticide product undergo
extensive chemical, toxicological, and field-testing before being registered as
a pesticide. Some testing is done under field conditions using commercial
application equipment to fully understand the pesticide’s chemical properties,
safety, and efficacy. Because testing undertaken as part of the
registration process necessarily involves an unregistered product or is for a
use not previously approved in the registration of the pesticide, EPA sometimes
must first authorize the distribution and sale under FIFRA section 5. The
EUP establishes limited conditions for the transportation, application, and
disposal of the pesticide material used in the tests. Pesticides
registered under an EUP may not be sold or distributed other than through approved
participants in the test program, and use is limited to the conditions
specified in the EUP. Biopesticides also
require EUPs when used in experimental settings.”
Citrus greening was first detected in the early 1900s when
it destroyed citrus trees in China, where it is known as huanglongbing (HLB),
translated as yellow shoot disease, by choking off the flow of nutrients.
The disease is transmitted by the Asian citrus psyllid, first detected in
Florida in 1998, an insect that sucks the bacteria out of one tree and injects
them into another as it feeds on the sap of leaves. The citrus industry
in Florida tripled pesticide applications in an attempt to kill the insects to
stop or slow the spread of the disease and feeds citrus trees additional micro-
and macro-nutrients and resistance-enhancing products, but eradication is not
now considered a feasible option.
According to a task force report from the
National Research Council (NRC) released in 2010, a worldwide review of
existing cultivated citrus found little or no evidence of immunity for any
variety. The lack of immunity in any cultivated variety eliminated
traditional breeding to transfer immunity into commercial varieties. With
no hope of eradicating the disease or transferring immunity by traditional
breeding, the future of commercial orange juice production in Florida was at
risk.
That led SGC, one of the largest
citrus producers in Florida, with three groves all infected
with citrus greening, to seek solutions to the disease.
They participated in a wide variety of research projects with
several universities and state and federal agencies focused on
developing environmentally sound and scientifically proven methods to
manage and control the disease. Included was the research on the
protein derived from spinach that attacks the invading bacteria, which was
developed through a program with Texas A&M University Agri-Life Research
and Erik Mirkov, a Professor of Plant Virology at Texas A&M University,
Weslaco.
SGC may now move forward with field tests,
consistent with conditions set by EPA in the EUP, to evaluate the efficacy of
the spinach protein against citrus greening in citrus plant tissues and
continue to generate environmental, health and safety data that are required
under federal law to support a fully registered product for commercial
use. On the basis of SGC’s related petition, EPA also has concluded that
residues of the spinach protein in citrus are safe for the public.
Company President Kress said in the news
release, “The company directed a research focus towards spinach because it is
already safely consumed daily and should be more favorably received by
consumers.” Kress went on to say, “It is important to state that as
all US regulatory controlled field trials and evaluations are on-going, there
is no citrus fruit or juice product from the tests in the commercial product
market today.” As EPA said in its general explanation about EUPs, “Some
testing is done under field conditions…” Research theories and experiments
will now be put to the test under real field conditions as allowed by the EUP
from EPA.
While there is plenty of evidence from other
crops about the safety of the technology, each crop is judged on the research
information provided to EPA from field trials. The oranges from these
trees are expected to be the same as conventional oranges, but that will have
to be shown by the results of the data collected for EPA. Over 4.5
billion acres of biotech crops have been grown worldwide since the technology
was commercialized in 1996.
If this research develops as expected,
oranges will not be the first fruit that has benefited from
biotechnology. During the 1990s, papaya farmers in Hawaii almost
lost the industry to the deadly ringspot virus that spread through the
islands. It became almost impossible to grow the fruit. Papayas
were made resistant to the virus by inserting a piece of the virus’s own genes
into papayas, effectively inoculating plants. The industry has recovered
and 2,500 acres of biotech papayas are grown in Hawaii. China has about
20,000 acres. Other countries are developing resistant papayas for
local markets.
Bananas may be next on the list of fruits
threatened. The popular Cavendish variety is threatened by the Fusarium
wilt fungus that has been spreading around the world for the last 20 years.
As the field trials continue, the industry
is looking ahead to consumer reactions. Oranges and orange juice are
widely traded globally. Citrus greening also exists wherever oranges are
grown. What consumers decide will influence production and trade around
the world.
Ross Korves is a Trade and Economic
Policy Analyst with Truth About Trade & Technology (www.truthabouttrade.org). Follow us: @TruthAboutTrade
and @World_Farmers
on Twitter | Truth About Trade & Technology on Facebook.
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