Tomatoes are the most popular and economically most valuable vegetable globally. In fact, it is the world’s fourth most valuable food crop. Unfortunately, many insects also find tomatoes as appealing as humans do. A massive quantity of tomatoes is lost annually due to insect pests and the plant diseases they transmit. Many farmers spray a lot of pesticides trying to prevent these losses, which seriously damages their health and eats into their profits.

WorldVeg researchers and many others around the world have been trying to make tomatoes less attractive to insects while still maintaining their market appeal. This is a challenging and costly area of research that requires traits of tomato wild relatives – plants producing nearly inedible tomatoes, to be introduced into cultivated tomato plants. To see if such investments can be justified, an international team of economists quantified the potential economic gains of insect-resistant tomato cultivars and published their findings in the International Journal of Pest Management (Depenbusch et al., 2023).

This research focused on Bangladesh and India as part of the project ‘Resist Detect Protect: wide spectrum insect resistance and sound management strategies to sustainably manage insect pests on Solanaceous vegetables in South Asia’, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). A total of 744 smallholder tomato farmers were interviewed to quantify tomato yields, cost of production, and the pest management methods used. Crop experts were also interviewed about the potential effects of insect-resistant cultivars and the time it will take to develop and scale these.

The researchers applied an economic modeling approach to capture trade-offs between changes in farmer supply and consumer demand as mediated by market prices. The analysis required making several assumptions about the technology and its likely adoption. They estimated that insect resistant cultivars introduced into Bangladesh and India would generate an economic gain of more than US$8.6 billion across these two countries over a 20-year period. This gain would derive from a higher mean crop yields and lower production costs, while assuming that it would take six years for the first insect-resistant cultivars to become commercially available. The main gain would stem from the control of the tomato leaf miner Phthorimaea absoluta, the main cause of tomato yield loss especially in India. This insect can also be controlled through integrated pest management, the adoption of which could generate economic benefits of US$264 million over the same period. These gains do not include benefits to human and environment health from reduced pesticide use, which are likely to be substantial.

These findings show the tremendous potential economic gains from investing in vegetable breeding research, though a complex trait like insect-resistance requires access to genetic resources and long-term investment. While India has a vibrant private vegetable seed sector, investments typically focus on short-term goals and only a few companies can use genebank material or choose to invest in complex traits. This case of insect resistant tomatoes also shows how international public research of the World Vegetable Center complements the research of the private sector.

Pepijn Schreinemachers

Depenbusch L, Sequeros T, Schreinemachers P, Sharif M, Mannamparambath K, Uddin N, Hanson P. 2023. Tomato pests and diseases in Bangladesh and India: farmers’ management and potential economic gains from insect resistant varieties and integrated pest management. International Journal of Pest Management, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/09670874.2023.2252760