Fruit fly eradication deemed achievable

"My job is eradication and I know it's achievable, and that's what I'm focused on," he said.

The Riverland grower and former Citrus Australia SA Region chair took on the role in mid November, and is proud to report that there has only been three outbreaks in the past six months.

"When I first started in the role, within a couple of weeks, we had a grower meeting called 'ahead of the curve'," he said.

"It was called the curve because we start to see activity increase this time of year as the weather warms and there is so much host fruit around this time of year.

"So we were expecting it to be busy from the end of November to April. But we are also doing a lot of things to counteract that."

The current figure is 48 outbreaks since December 2020, but Mr Poulos said 25 of those haven't been active for three months to more than a year.

"We're not fighting 48 outbreaks at this time," he said.

"In the whole month of December, we only found 86 flies. That's a whole month. We're not inundated. This isn't like thousands of flies a week coming out.

"And it's quite concentrated in three spots, which is Renmark, Berri near town, and a flare up in Barmera. We're doing extra treatments in those areas to try and keep those numbers down.

"But we're seeing very low activity outside of this."

Mr Poulos said what was increasing was their response team, which since November has gone from 150 ground staff to 200, with the aim of employing 220 to get through the busy period.

The staff are monitoring 4000 traps in the Riverland weekly, while there are another 6000 traps across metropolitan Adelaide.

"The surveillance is huge," Mr Poulos said.

"We know it hasn't come out of the Riverland, you get the odd fly here and there, but that happens every year. There's no outbreak outside of the Riverland.

"But we still need strong community engagement. Backyard fruit is always an issue.

"Of the three recent outbreaks, two of them were reported by people finding larvae at home, and they've rang the fruit fly hotline.

"We are consistently getting up to 60 calls to the fruit fly hotline every week - a lot of these things turn out to be nothing, but on the very odd occasion it is something and we react quickly.

"That's why community is so important - if we don't have the community helping us, we're fighting one hand tied behind our backs.

"Community engagement, industry engagement - that's how we're gonna get out of this."

Mr Poulos says he meets with industry weekly and the support has been "massive".

"We have a whole market access team here, helping people move their fruit, get them accredited, doing the right treatment, transporting it properly," he said.

"That's our two priorities - eradication, and making sure the Riverland still functions, we need growers selling their fruit."

The other key factor in the government's fruit fly eradication program is sterile insect technology, which has been "ramped up" since mid last year.

"We're now, on average, putting out over 35 million flies a week in the Riverland," Mr Poulos said.

"And we reached a milestone in late December of a billion flies that have now been reared and released over this area.

"They are an important tool we're using in this eradication program, on top of the baiting, stripping trees, getting rid of the host fruit, extra traps etc."

The end date for all outbreaks is currently April 16, but may change if more fruit flies are detected.

Mr Poulos expects that date to be extended due to the busy period.

"But the key message is, if we can get community, industry and the department all working together, we'll get through this," he said.

"The government is committed to eradicating fruit fly to protect SA's $1.4-billion horticulture industry."