Citrus greening detected in Hopkins

And in the south, Citrus Greening has been affecting citrus trees since the earlier part of this year. The dangerous disease is spread by a bacteria that lives in the vascular system of the plant and disrupts the flow of nutrients within the plant, ultimately killing the tree. Recently, surveillance exercises have detected that the disease has been more prevalent especially in the Hopkins area. So now, the Belize Agricultural Health Authority and the Citrus Growers Association are taking a more aggressive approach to control this dangerous threat to one of Belize’s big income earners.

Via Phone: Dr. Stephen Williams, Dir., Research & Education Institute, CGA
“The effect on the citrus industry so far has been particularly bad for the nurseries because as there needs to be a restriction on the movement of nursery plants to prevent a spread of the disease throughout the country. The disease in the longer term, maybe a year or so, will be expected to impact the quality of the fruit. At this point though we haven’t gotten any reports from the factory and of course the delivery season is just starting and it isn’t affecting the quality at this point. So I don’t think we would expect it at this stage to actually affect the quality of the fruit, but that might be down the line.”

Via Phone: Francisco Gutierrez, Technical Dir., Plant Health Services, BAHA
“Although its basically in different parts of the country there are some areas where it is very much concentrated, basically in the Pomona or in the Stann Creek or parts of the Stann Creek District, although we did find many cases further south, with great concentrations in the Hopkins area as well as the Placencia Peninsula. The other measures we have taken after that is to secure some funding to start doing more in depth work, basically surveillance, determining – doing tree by tree survey to determine where all these contaminated plants are and we’re now starting to eliminate this tree. Areas like the Cayo District are kind of like relatively free so we’re not permitting movement of plants to the Cayo area. The areas that are contaminated, there’s not a whole lot that we can do except to do control of the insects. It is going to be an ongoing battle from now on to be able to keep the infection from spreading at a local level and then at a national level.”

The first cases of Citrus Greening were detected in Belize in 2005.