Each launch sends into the air
thousands of males of the fruit fly, one of the most harmful orchard
pests, in what advocates say is a prime example of how nuclear science
can benefit both agriculture and the environment.
have been bombarded with radioactive Cobalt-60 in an Israeli
biotechnology plant to make them sterile in a bid to reduce the fly
population and the damage they wreak on the crop.
United Nations' atomic agency says it shows how nuclear technology -
more commonly associated with energy or atom bombs - is harnessed to
help make an "important contribution" in solving the world's food
Scientists are developing
and refining the Sterile Insect Technology (SIT) for different species -
including the tsetse fly in Africa - at the Seibersdorf laboratory of
the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) outside Vienna.
is essentially a form of birth control," IAEA head Yukiya Amano said.
"The result has been a drop of no less than 75 percent in fruit fly
damage" in Neretva, where nine out of ten people are involved in the
citrus fruit industry.
week, between April and November, shipments containing 5 million
sterilized male flies reach the fertile valley in southern Croatia, the
northernmost point in Europe where tangerines are successfully grown.
farmers use boats to spread the male flies in remote areas, part of
project which started two years ago to combat a pest that destroyed
about a third of the crop.
sterilized males outnumber the local fruit flies and gradually take the
place of normal males. They can mate, but there is no offspring.
Consequently, the number of larvae, which feed on ripening tangerines,
quickly declines.For mor information, please, visit the