DAVAO CITY, Dec. 17 — An entomologist from the Crop Protection Cluster-National Crop Protection Center of the University of the Philippines UP Los Banos (UPLB) conducted monitoring of anthropods as part of the Confined Field Testing (CFT) of Bt eggplant here.

Entomologist Mario Navasero is now conducting the monitoring at the UP Mindanao the past week.
Navasero said entomology is the study of insects and his purpose here is to monitor the effect of the Bt eggplants on "non-target organisms", a collective term for insects, spiders and mites that inhabit plants. The target organisms are the fruit and shoot borer worm.

He said the monitoring of data relating to "non-target organisms" will be done weekly from December 2010 to March 2011 as part of the CFT.

The CFT is being done in seven sites nationwide and each CFT is composed of eight varieties/lines of eggplant. Of these numbers, five are of the Bt eggplant varieties and three are for non-Bt eggplant varieties. Each pot has 40 plants.

"My role is to observe and monitor the behavior of insects in the CFT to determine whether Bt eggplant has detrimental effect to "non-target organism".

At the UP Mindanao he said they observed that there are still few insects so far since the plants are young but the results from the CFT in Pangasinan, Bicol and Laguna have shown that there is no difference in the occurrence of anthropods between the Bt and the non-Bt eggplant plots, he said.
Navasero explained that the reason why they focus on eggplant over other crops is because eggplant is planted in over 20,000 hectares of some 80,000 farmers in the Philippines.

He said eggplant is the leading crop planted in the Philippines in terms of volume and area of production although he stressed that it is not correct to compare backyard gardening of the plant to commercial production because of pest pressure.

The presence of insects, mites and the Fruit and Shoot Borer increases in commercial production.
Navasero also said as much as 80 percent of the plants are self-pollinating and some flowers are pollinated even before it opens.

Cross pollination occurs only within a forty-meter radius and the 200-meter buffer zone between the testing site and the indigenous eggplant is more than enough.

In pollinating, bees are travelling as far as six kilometres,” he said.

He said it is the behavior of bees to identify specific sites for collecting pollen and nectar and once they have identified the site they only forage there and do not visit flowers along their way going to the site and back to their hive/nest.

As to the concern of some sectors that multinational companies will control the supply of seed, he said UP Los Banos will produce the seeds and will ensure that these are affordable and since the seeds to be produced are open-pollinated, the farmers buy the seeds only once as the farmer can propagate it from the Bt eggplant itself. (PNA)