How many times in a day do you think about tomatoes? Probably not until you are standing in the servery staring at the salad bar, telling yourself to eat salad. I know that I don’t, despite being passionately pro-tomato. So, in an effort to better support my favorite vegetable-like fruit, I read the article You Say Tomato, These Moths Say Dinner.

Basically, there is an interesting contrast between the status of tomatoes in different regions in the world. The end of August makes the beginning of the traditional festival of La Tomatina in Spain. (The festival/world’s largest food fight, all with tomatoes.) At the same time, countries such as Nigeria and Kenya are watching tomato prices spike.

The reason behind this? Tuta absoluta, the tomato leaf miner. This moth leaves nothing behind. Literally. It will eat everything from the leaves, to the fruit, to the flowers. In Kaduna State, Nigeria, up to 80% of the tomato crop has been destroyed. Prices for a basket went from $1.5o to $212.

What I find most interesting is the control methods that are being implemented. Firstly, there is a real disparity in how countries can address the issue. This is to say that developing countries often do not have the access to integrated pest management (IPM). However, there are a good number of alternative solutions are being explored. These include pheromone traps to disrupt mating, biopesticides, and highly selective chemical pesticides. I hope that this invasion will not go the way that all previous ones seem to have gone, aka create dangerous selection pressure on the group in question. However, I think that the alternative methods are promising, provided they get to the developing countries that need them. I’ll be interested to see how it pans out, especially given that the United States may be the next region to which the moth expands.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/science/you-say-tomato-these-moths-say-dinner.html