The current plight of Trinidad and Tobago’s coconut industry invokes the deep-rooted adage, “Nearer to Church, further from God”—failing to take full advantage of exceptionally beneficial opportunities at our immediate disposal.
Year after year this country faces its traditional dry season, some worse than others. And while temporary shortages of coconuts may occasionally occur, rarely are they prolonged. In 2010, the lengthy scarcity was attributed specifically to the dreaded red ring disease.
It leads me to surmise that while on this occasion there may be some link to the dry season, the dearth seems more substantially attributed to a repeat of the 2010 experience, the devastating red ring menace.
But how could such a calamity befall, of all places, Trinidad and Tobago?
Perhaps little is known that after decades of unsuccessfully investing billions of dollars on foreign experts criss-crossing the globe in search of the answer to the evasive disease, it took a humble, civic-minded, intellectually driven son of our soil to come to the rescue, thus begging the question: what has become of the phenomenal breakthrough legacied by T&T’s Dr Reginald Griffith who passed away quietly in March 2015?
Are we so blight that our coconut plantations are once again dastardly infected when, in reality, this nation should be leading the world in warding off any resurgence of a red ring epidemic anywhere, anytime?
Former director of the Red Ring Research Division, Ministry of Agriculture, etc, Reggie, as he was fondly known, was the individual before whom the world genuflected, having not only scientifically discovered the root cause of the disease, but introduced practical, inexpensive measures to control its spread.
In 1983, the World University Round Table honoured him with a doctorate (DSc) in biology. He consulted and lectured in India, Sri Lanka and numerous Latin American countries on coconut diseases, research methods and control measures; authored over 30 papers on these topics in English, Spanish and Portuguese; was the 1979 chairman of the Fifth FAO Conference on Coconut Production, Protection and Processing; and a member of the FAO Coconut Research Review Committee during 1980-1984.
Having bequeathed such a power-packed institutional legacy, what could have gone so absurdly wrong that we now find ourselves identifying an erratic spread of the feared red ring disease as contributing to the alarming shortage of coconut water?
If, as Dr Griffith professed, “Prolonged drought reduces insect attack and, losses to red ring disease are heaviest at the end of the wet season: during the first three months of the dry season, December to February,” who, I ask, dropped the ball? Why had preventative measures not been meticulously taken to forestall the heavy spread of the disease which was clearly predictable?
In a paper published in the journal Plant Disease (Vol 71, No 2, February 1987), Reggie confirmed Trinidad and Tobago was the country in which red ring disease was first encountered: the location Cedros, the year 1905, when T&T agriculturists were responding to a 1900 wilt disease called bud rot of coconut palm which was inflicting epidemic destruction of coconut trees in several countries, causing considerable anxiety in Trinidad, Jamaica, Honduras, Cuba and Puerto Rico. In 1919, the newly discovered disease was named red ring because of the characteristic red band of tissue present in the stem of affected palms.
Griffith wrote that by 1920, red ring had spread to Honduras, Guyana, Panama, Venezuela, St Vincent and Grenada. It was determined that the nematode, Rhadinaphelenchus cocophilus, was the causal agent.
To stem the spread, a programme of inoculation was successfully undertaken.
Ultimately, the palm weevil, known in the region before 1827, was implicated as the carrier of the nematode.
Griffith found that coconut palms, especially those three to ten years old, were susceptible; further, that the major symptom was the band of brick-red tissue within the roots, stems and petioles, and that occasionally trees over 20 years old had a solid central cylinder of reddened tissue in the trunk.
External symptoms, he said, were confined to the leaves which wilt, turn yellow, then brown. Trees aged three to ten years die within two months; while older, heavy-bearing trees shed all their fruit as the leaves become infected. Occasionally, the crown of the tree falls off as the larvae of the palm weevil tunnel extensively while developing in the diseased crown. The internal symptom is usually fully developed before external symptoms become visible.
Has Dr Griffith’s internationally adopted body of work been forgotten, discounted, disregarded, shelved, or plain and simply slighted?
It remains an unanswered question: why were the necessary preventative measures not thoroughly taken to forestall the post-wet season aggressive red ring spread? Your guess is as good as mine.
—Author Roy Mitchell is a former special adviser and co-ordinator, National Tripartite Advisory Council (NTAC).
