Bt Eggplant Adds Revenue, Safety for Farmers in Bangladesh

Brinjal news update from Agrilinks:

This post is written by Dr. Anthony Shelton, Matt Hayes and Joan Conrow.

Eggplant is an extremely popular crop in Bangladesh and is essential to food security in the country. The vegetable is part of the daily diet for the 161 million people in Bangladesh and is grown by an estimated 150,000 farmers. Being the dominant winter vegetable in the country, eggplant is cultivated on 28 percent of the growing area dedicated to vegetables and provides important cash to resource-poor farmers. But there is a problem; the destructive eggplant fruit and shoot borer (EFSB) forces farmers to spray expensive and toxic insecticides more than 80 times each growing season to try and control the insect and its voracious appetite. 

Despite intensive spraying multiple times each week, farmers still incur tremendous losses of 60 percent or more which results in millions of dollars of losses. And more importantly, such intensive use of toxic insecticides affects the health of farmers, consumers, and the environment.

A game-changer for farmers and consumers

As an alternative to this unsustainable practice, a public-private partnership was formed in 2003 with funding from USAID to Cornell University to lead a consortium to develop eggplant engineered to express a protein from a common bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Working with the Indian seed company Mahyco and the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute, nine varieties of Bt eggplant were developed that eliminate the need to spray for EFSB. Four of these varieties received regulatory approval in 2013 and were grown by 20 farmers in 2014. Today more than 27,000 farmers in Bangladesh grow Bt eggplant, and there are indications that more farmers are eager to reap the benefits of these improved varieties.

Making gains in Bangladesh

A new study published in May 2020 in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology confirms the economic and environmental benefits of this genetically-engineered eggplant for farmers and its acceptance in the Bangladeshi market…continues at Agrilinks