Fly Fight

Two months ago, the 2,000-tree lemon and orange grove of Gabriel Ramirez, near Valles, on the Pan American Highway, was a rich and blooming place. Last week, like most orchards in the lush, hot valley, Ramirez' trees were soot-black with the leaf-ravaging larvae of the mosca prieta (citrus black fly).

Mexico City newspapers awoke to the threat of a national disaster: Mexican agriculture faced a ruinous fruit-fly plague. Nearly 2,000,000 of the country's 16 million citrus trees were infested. U.S. citrus growers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, with 18,500,000 trees just 250 miles north of the infested area, screamed to federal and state' governments for a fast preventive war.

Nineteen years ago, U.S. experts stopped the black fly's first severe invasion of the hemisphere, in Cuba. At that time they imported a parasitic insect from Malaya that destroyed the pest. But for Mexico, where the fly turned up in 1935 in west coast Sinaloa, the old parasite was no good. Since then U.S. scientists have found a new Malayan parasite, a wasp whose larvae will hatch inside the Mexican fly's larvae and devour them. This week a shipment of wasps was on its way to Mexico for the test.

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