agriculture

Bugs infest coffee farms

Víctor Arosemena/LA PRENSA

bugged: To control the spread of a boring beetle that threatens Panama’s coffee crop, the Ministerio de Desarrollo Agropecuaria (Mida) has extended an agricultural quarantine in Chiriquí. 1074584

Coffee growers, technicians and officials of the Ministerio de Desarrollo Agropecuaria (Mida) have joined forces to quash the spread of a boring beetle (Hypothenemus hampeii) that threatens the country’s coffee-cultivating regions.

The frontlines of the battle continue to be the coffee plantations along the border with Costa Rica, where Mida authorities have extended the area under agricultural quarantine to include Renacimiento, Bugaba and the community of Potrerillos, in the district of Dolega, in the Chiriquí highlands.

Maximino Díaz, agricultural director for Mida, said that efforts to control what he called the “plague” of beetles is making slow but steady progress. That’s quite a change from late 2004, when the destructive bug’s presence in Panama sent the coffee industry into a panic, even though growers knew it had been just across the border for some time.

He attributed much of that progress to the quarantine measures, and the training producers underwent to learn preventive techniques.

“Thanks to the cooperation between producers and the authorities, a quarantine has been achieved and we have restricted the handling of coffee produced in that area so that the infected crops do not leave the perimeters [of the quarantined area],” said Díaz.

The coffee-boring insect belongs to the same family as the scarab beetle of Africa, only much smaller. Even as an adult, the black-shelled beetle doesn’t reach more than a millimeter in length.

Mario Serracín, agronomist and organic coffee producer in Boquete, explained that the beetle’s habit of tunneling into coffee beans is part of its reproduction cycle.

“It literally drills into the fruit within 100 days after the plant flowers, depositing its eggs. The larvae, which are transparent and whitish, then feed on the bean,” he said.

The damaged fruit then drops to the ground, where the larvae matures into an adult beetle. Serracín said that under ideal conditions, the beetle population can multiply up to 10 times as it waits for coffee crops to flower again and repeat the cycle.

Over time, the whole plant is weakened, making it susceptible to a fungus that ruins the taste of the coffee bean.

Despite the producers best efforts, however, Mida admits that once the beetles arrive, there’s no sure-fire way to eradicate them completely.

“The controls have worked fairly well,” said Díaz. “But to declare the area a beetle-free zone would be to misunderstand the magnitude of the problem.”

Resolving that problem depends on one important variable: human nature.

Every year there are workers who break the quarantine to work in infested areas of Costa Rica, putting more areas in Panama at risk.

The islands of Papua, New Guinea and Kona, in the archipelago of Hawaii, are the only coffee regions in the world declared 100 percent free of the boring beetle.