Fruit Fly Fighters: Israeli Green Tech Firm Saving Crops By Tackling Infestations Worldwide
August 23, 2018
This article was re-published with permission from NOCamels.com – Israeli Innovation News.
Fruit flies are considered among the most annoying household pests, buzzing around food and waste and generally being a disgusting nuisance. In the agricultural world, they are an outright menace, impacting whole economies by threatening dozens of fruit and vegetable species and costing hundreds of millions in lost crops.
They are also notoriously hard to control, demanding expensive and often harmful, repeat treatments that include spraying whole fields, with untold environmental implications.
In Africa and Asia, different species of fruit flies have wreaked havoc on a number of important fruit exports, including mango, of which India is the world’s number one producer, guava, sapota (chikoo), and pomegranate. These losses have cost farmers, food vendors, government agencies, and others in the supply chain, hundreds of millions of dollars. Even the local markets have been affected with some farmers uprooting their fruit trees due to severe infestations.
The Israeli agritech company Biofeed has been on the forefront of developing safe, eco-friendly pest control methods as alternatives to insecticides and pesticides, for the better part of two decades. And it is now bringing its green technology to India to help navigate the damage and set India’s mango industry on a new path.
Late last month, Biofeed signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with India’s northwestern state of Gujarat, a deal facilitated by the Israeli NGO Start-Up Nation Central, which tracks Israel’s tech and innovation ecosystem, and the Indian tech incubator iCreate.
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