Cost-effective fruit fly (Tephritidae) management measures to facilitate export of South Africa’s deciduous fruit: area-wide or field-by-field?

Fruit flies (Tephritidae) are major pests worldwide, contributing to significant damage of fruit and vegetable crops, as well as causing quarantine issues with export produce. This paper analyses the cost-effectiveness of two approaches to manage economically-significant fruit fly pest of deciduous fruits in South Africa, namely, area-wide (AW) and field-by-field (FF) integrated pest management (IPM), to facilitate South African deciduous fruit exports to the EU market. Cost-effectiveness addresses the following question: which pest management approach is able to achieve the goal of exporting fruits to the EU in terms of pest control at lower costs? We develop a costing framework to compare the costs of the two pest management approaches and apply it to production areas implementing AW-IPM and FF-IPM in the Western Cape province, South Africa. Our results indicate that given the existing situation in South Africa, the costs of AW-IPM are substantially lower than the costs of FF-IPM.