Public Comment

Why would a moth that has probably been in California for at least a decade, that is not spreading as rapid as California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) demographic models predict and that has not devastated the agriculture in the countries where has been established for decades, suddenly become the target of the state agriculture’s department and agribusiness? This little insect is simply being used as an excuse to protect California’s big agriculture interests and to justify the continuation and expansion of the budgets of the state’s agricultural bureaucracies. For this strategy to work, it is necessary to resort to the well known terror campaign, so familiar to us as it is daily used by the current U.S. administration as a mechanism to justify the war that enriches a few big military industries and oil companies and impoverishes the vast population now subjected to increasing home foreclosures, unemployment, increased oil and food prices and cuts on education and other basic services. 

In a globalized world supposedly integrated via free trade, California must constantly look for ways to protect its agriculture against trade restrictions that would be imposed by other countries if the light brown apple moth (LBAM) or any other insect species, regardless of population numbers, happens to be listed as a quarantine pest in the importing country. In fact the USA considers the LBAM a quarantine pest, and it will reject any shipment from any country if one dead LBAM egg, larvae or adult is found in such cargo. Exporting farmers would lose millions of dollars, as often happens with farmers from my country, Chile, whose shipments of fruits are rejected at U.S. ports when they find not only a dead insect pest, but even a dead or live lady bug. This forces farmers to overuse pesticides and also prompts governments to take measures, even one as ineffective and unnecessary as aerial spraying of insect sex pheromones for eradicating pest populations, which in itself is a losing ecological proposition. 

In California, despite public opposition, these measures seem conveniently implemented especially when the owner of the pheromone manufacturing company is a good friend and campaign supporter of the state’s governor, and at the same time is a large scale farmer producing thousands of acres of pest-susceptible, biodiversity-void monocultures of almonds, citrus and other crops exported all over the world. For this person and his company and for the CDFA, the whole ordeal is a win-win situation, while the big losers are the public in general whose tax dollars will be wasted, and the growing number of organic farmers who are not afraid of this moth because their diversified farm operations provide habitat to natural predators and parasites that would maintain the pest in check. In addition, if the insect ever were to reach pest status, instead of devoting $75 million for eradication, much research on biological control could be funded to treat only the affected areas of farms. For example it would be possible to test various species of Trichogramma parasitic wasps that kill the moth eggs, or applications of strains of Bacillus thuringinesis, a bacterium specific to the Lepidoptera (moth) family that kills the larvae of the moth, or to bring predators from the center of origin of the LBAM. That’s what we did in the late 1800s, when the Rodolia lady bug was introduced from Australia to control the cottony cushion scale, keeping this citrus pest regulated until today, saving California millions of dollars in health and environmental costs by eliminating the need for chemical pesticides. 

Miguel A. Altieri is a professor of agroecology at UC Berkeley.