By Zadie Neufville
BROMPTON, Jamaica, Sep 17 2001 (IPS)

This farming area just inland from the south coast fishing town of Old Harbour appears to hold the answer to the decimation of Jamaica’s papaya crop by the virulent Ring Spot disease.

Eight years after the disease began its devastation of farms – killing trees, putting farmers out of business – experts here are propagating a transgenic variety of papaya they say resists Ring Spot.

Scientist Paula Tennant says that come 2003, farmers can begin planting a new disease resistant variety that is now on its third field test and from which a seed bank is being developed.

Tennant, the scientist behind the fruit’s development, says she is confident the new genetically modified (GMO) variety will restore local farmers to their rightful place in the export market.

Farmer Piers Harvey says he applauds the effort but cautions that Jamaica will lose its the European market if it goes ahead and introduces GMO papayas.

“The European consumers don’t want GMO products so the buyers won’t take it,” he says.

Ring Spot began its devastation at the eastern end of this island in 1993. Moving westward, it slashed production from 21,512 tonnes in 1994 to 5,074 tonnes in 2000.

Harvey, who also is vice president of the papaya growers association, says more than 800 hectares of the 1,200 hectares in production at the time were wiped out within a year as large areas under cultivation were destroyed to control the spread of the disease.

Only about 12 of the larger farmers with considerable investments are still fighting the disease and trying to maintain exports, he adds.

The programme to develop the transgenic papaya began immediately after the 1993 Ring Spot outbreak and is a collaborative effort with U.S.-based Cornell University, says Vitus Evans, head of the Jamaica Agricultural Development Foundation (JADF).

JADF is spending more than 260,000 dollars to develop the new variety even as it keeps up annual loan disbursements of more than six million dollars to papaya farmers.

The disease is exacting a heavy toll on farmers, says Fitz Shaw, commercial manager at the Ebony Park Heart Academy, a government- run agricultural school.

“Controlling the disease means cutting out trees as soon as they become infected and farmers lose up to a quarter of the crop by the time the plants become productive in nine months” Shaw says.

Most papaya trees will last for three years, by which time they become too tall for reaping, he explains.

Harvey notes that farmers planting papayas have learned to control the disease while at the same time keeping the fruits free from chemical residue. It is a rigorous but necessary job since the United States, now the largest export market, has very stringent phytosanitary regulations.

The locally bred Solo Sun variety has caught on in North American because of its taste, bright colour, and size, says Shaw, who oversees the agricultural school’s 16 hectares of papaya trees in central Jamaica. The Solo Sun varies from about the size of a pear to that of a large avocado.

With production at its lowest since 1994, farmers are consolidating their efforts and putting all their fruits into the North American market, partly because it costs less to ship the produce to North America than to Europe.

The transgenic papaya is one of several agricultural crops Jamaica’s Scientific Research Council (SRC) believes hold the answer to the pest and disease problem that has caused significant decline in the country’s agricultural production and export in recent years, says SRC head Dorothy Byfield.

So far, several cloned varieties of banana, plantain, orange, and herbs are either in laboratories or on in trial plots at the government’s agricultural research station at Bodles, about 27 kilometres outside the capital, Kingston.

The government is planning to hold public consultations over draft regulations on the introduction and control of GMO foods as well as the protection of local biological resources. The National Committee on Science and Technology’s Yvonne Brown says the draft rules are set to go before parliament within six months.

Environmentalists have been silent on the issue and say they will wait until the public consultations begin before speaking out.

Some local scientists have voiced concern that the release of GMO crops will result in the creation of new, mutated and highly- resistant ‘super weeds’ but plant researcher Phillip Chung says such fears appear unfounded.

Byfield, at the SRC, cites the success of minisett yams, a smaller variety of the tuber developed more than 15 years ago from tissue culture. The product is widely accepted in the U.S. and Canadian markets, which account for the majority of traditional and non- traditional exports.

While they admit the need for additional research in determining the effects of GMO products on other agricultural crops, Byfield and Chung say the shortage of research funding is their biggest problem.

According to Byfield, despite funding from a number of sources, plant development at SRC is hampered by shortage of money. For his part, Chung says he is concerned that even with the technology to test for transgenic genes that many have jumped species, there is no money to do the work.

Last year, Jamaica’s research budget was just over 5.66 million dollars.

Absent alternatives, Harvey says he supports the introduction of the GMO papaya despite the drawbacks. He and Evans both say that creative marketing and the U.S. acceptance of transgenic products could offer new hope for local farmers.

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