An on-the-spot MASHAV course to combat the whitefly in the Dominican Republic not only helped fight the damaging aphid, but also raised awareness locally on the significance of pest control in general and the importance of reducing dependence on polluting pesticides. This first course led to an additional on-the-spot course on the subject of Area-wide Integrated Pest Management (APM).
Reuben Ausher, Director of the Department of Crop Protection of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development's Extension Service, recalled that the Dominican Republic's initial request for help came back in 1996. The whitefly, known locally as the sweet potato whitefly, or in Latin as the tobacco whitefly - Bemisia tabaci - was devastating the local tomato crop.
"This was hugely damaging local industry in the Dominican Republic, which produces secondary tomato-based products like ketchup and paste for the US market. These industries were near collapse," explained Reuben Ausher and Yoram Melamed, State Extension Crop Protection Specialist for Field Crops in the same department, who together led the first on-the-spot course.
The whitefly, feared for decades by farmers in the Middle East, is a tiny sucking insect, which during its 21-day life cycle inflicts enormous damage on crops. Prevalent in parts of the Americas such as Cuba and Florida, as well as the Dominican Republic since the 1980s, the whitefly, rather like the common fly when it lands on something, sucks out some of the goodness for its own nutrition, while injecting into the leaf tissue liquids that spread viruses. It also lays its eggs on plants and leaves. Most damaging of all, as the farmers of the Dominican Republic were discovering to their cost, the whitefly carries and infects the tomato plant with a virus, known as the Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus (TYLCV), which can render entire fields of tomatoes unmarketable.
Back in 1996, Yair Sachs, State Extension Specialist of the Department of Crop Protection, flew out to the Dominican Republic to assist a local non-government organization in the north west of the country to assess methods of combating the whitefly. The resulting report recommended that Israeli specialists be sent to the region to offer on-the-spot courses in integrated pest management. Yoram Melamed and Sando Tsuriel, Regional Crop Protection Extension Specialist, travelled to Central America in November 1999 to give week-long courses to local agronomists, technicians and department heads involved in agriculture. They gave two courses, each a week long, to groups of 25 professionals, thus reaching more than 100 people.
The two Israelis were based in the north west of the Dominican Republic and gave the course to professionals from three provinces - Monte Cristi, Valverde and Dajabon, the last of which borders on Haiti.
"In the mornings we lectured in classrooms," explained Melamed, "while in the afternoons we would go out into the fields and see how the theories worked in practice."
"The afternoons were great fun for the local professionals," recollected Tsuriel, who lectured in English and had a Spanish translator working alongside him. "It was very spontaneous. We asked the course participants to ask questions related to the things we found. They brought me all sorts of damaged plants, fruits, vegetables and leaves and we discovered a diverse range of insects, bugs and butterflies that were damaging the crops. The participants began to realize what a complicated topic pest control is."
The local professionals in the Dominican Republic were also introduced to the concept of Integrated Pest Management (IPM). This is the globally embraced ideal that chemical pesticides should be kept to a minimum because of environmental and ecological damage they cause and the potential health hazards for the actual food produced.
Pest management throughout the world so often means spraying potentially toxic pesticides on a regular basis. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) was developed worldwide to decrease the dependence on pesticides. But the model developed in countries like the US and Australia, where single crops are grown in vast regions, is not always relevant to smaller countries like Israel and the Dominican Republic where large numbers of diverse crops are grown in relatively tiny areas. So Israeli agronomists developed a new model - Area-wide Integrated Pest Management (APM) - which has been highly effective in Israel. Over the past decade the amount of farming land on which APM is implemented has increased seven-fold.
With their appetites whetted on the topic of pest control by the initial on-the-spot course given in 1999, MASHAV representatives were invited back in April 2001 to give more lectures not only on the whitefly, but on pest control in general. Melamed gave two workshops, each three days long, in the north-west region, updating those professionals he had met two years previously. Together with Ausher a two-week course was given in Santiago, the regional capital and second largest city in the Dominican Republic, on APM with a special focus on the whitefly. Thirty professionals, including agronomists, government and NGO officials, attended the course, which was sponsored by Junta Agroempresarial Dominicana (JAD), a local NGO.
"The course's effectiveness was enhanced by the enormous local press coverage that it received," said Ausher. "Each participant was required to submit a project at the end of course and work related not only to the whitefly and tomatoes but other local crops such as corn, tobacco, potatoes, bananas and mangoes."
Ausher's and Melamed's course touched on all three stages of APM - supervised, integrated and finally biological control. The first stage - monitoring - involves sending out pest scouts and inspectors to analyze the pests and estimate their numbers. Small traps are utilized for this purpose. Too often farmers will simply spray their fields once a week without trying to understand whether such frequent spraying is really necessary. Often the numbers and types of pests will vary from season to season. Close scrutiny helps a farmer better understand his needs.
In the second stage, integrated control involves a range of methods proven effective worldwide. Farmers can switch to varieties of crops resistant to particular pests, while various types of netting, especially in greenhouses, can be an effective barrier, which pests cannot penetrate. An intriguing method is the use of yellow sticky traps that attract many pests, including the whitefly. The pests settle on the yellow traps or screens (for some reason the color yellow attracts them), and they are burnt up by the sun. Farmers can also use less toxic pesticides.
"One method which has been incredibly effective in the Dominican Republic," said Ausher, "is the use of a moratorium in growing. Farmers in a wide area are asked to leave their fields fallow for a month. The pests, in this case the whitefly with a life cycle of 21 days, cannot survive because they are left with nothing to feed on. During last summer (2001) I am told that this method was extremely successful in the Dominican Republic. Farmers there showed remarkable discipline in refraining from planting for a month. It must have cost them a lot of money, but they did it. I'm told that there were signs throughout the region warning farmers not to plant and that there were government patrols as well."
In the third phase of APM, biological pesticides can be used. "This is a complex method," added Ausher, "in which natural predators, parasites or fungi are bred to combat a pest. It is used very successfully in Israel against parasites that attack strawberry, pepper and subtropical fruit crops."
With the encouragement of the Israeli agronomists the farmers in the Dominican Republic are also setting up plant clinics which play a crucial role in plant disease diagnosis.
"It is not yet clear how successful they have been in the Dominican Republic," stressed Ausher and Melamed. "But what is clear is that an infrastructure for eradicating the whitefly is being put in place and that awareness on the topic of pest control has been raised enormously."
CINADCO - Launching a new outlook to agricultural in-country training programs
The in-country training programs, known to many of us as "on-the-spot" courses, have been an integral part of the activities of the Center for International Cooperation (MASHAV) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for almost four decades. Under the auspices of MASHAV, the Center for International Agricultural Development Cooperation (CINADCO), of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, has conducted agricultural in-country training courses in most developing countries around the world, on all continents and in five languages.
Over the years, along with the changes that have occurred in the world, the in-country training courses have also undergone changes in their structures, topics, duration, means and others. Old-timers will still remember with nostalgia their long missions to different parts of the world, carrying gigantic flip-charts and other extension paraphernalia which were used in their time. Nowadays, the situation is quite different, with smaller teams of two experts equipped with the latest electronic and computer gadgetry such as lap-tops, computer projectors, etc., conducting intensive two-week courses. In addition to the known traditional agricultural subjects, a wide range of new topics have been added, covering more than 50 subjects in agriculture and rural development.
By definition, the essence of the on-the-spot courses is that they are tailor-made and adapted to the different needs and realities of the requesting entity. Creativity and flexibility are the key words towards an innovative approach, taking into consideration the trends of mainstreaming capacity building, gender and ecology, together with updated technologies in production, planning and management.
A new catalogue of in-country training agricultural courses is published each year, in accordance with the list of subjects to be found here:
The example of the courses conducted in the Dominican Republic on the whitefly is one model which intends to reach the stage of implementation, along with the training program, so that the knowledge acquired will not remain on the theoretical level only.