CITRUS GREENING.

• Author: McNeil, Maggie
• Position: EYE ON ECOLOGY

Since it first was discovered in 2005, the bacterial disease known as citrus greening, or Huanglongbing (HLB), has devastated millions of acres of crops throughout the U.S. and abroad, ravaging citrus groves in Asia, Africa, and South America, impacting conventional and organic growers alike, but its injury to organic growers especially has been deep because most of the efforts underway to keep the deadly disease in check involve methods that are prohibited in organic produce production.

To help producers more effectively combat this disease that threatens their livelihoods, The Organic Center has released a paper that mines the existing body of scientific literature devoted to citrus greening, compiles relevant results, and synthesizes them to create a farmer/nurseryman-focused document that pinpoints and details organic-compliant practices for combating citrus greening and the Asian citrus psyllid (ACP) insect, which carries the disease. The study was published in the International Journal of Horticulture, Agriculture and Food Science.

"Organic citrus producers have suffered terrible losses from citrus greening, and they need to be aware of organic solutions to ward off this disease," says Jessica Shade, director of Science Programs for The Organic Center. "Our goal in releasing this paper is to help organic citrus growers fight this deadly disease without resorting to dangerous chemicals, genetic engineering, or other methods not in compliance with organic standards."

Citrus greening can spread quickly and, once a tree is infected, it cannot be cured. The most-common method for controlling HLB is by spraying large amounts of synthetic pesticides, such as neonicotinoids. These toxic sprays have had only limited success, and are responsible for large-scale bee die-offs. Other nonorganic research has focused on creating genetically modified organism varieties of citrus trees resistant to citrus...