The study, which began five years ago in the laboratories of the Plant Physiology Department of the Santiago de Guayaquil Catholic University, seeks to counteract the use of 5 million liters of chemical fungicides in Ecuador per year, which contaminate all the banana areas affected by black sigatoka.
According to the expert, a member of the Latin American Agroecology Network and its alternatives for Latin America (Rapal), the contamination manifests itself in diseases, such as cancer and malformations.
Llerena said they had successfully controlled the black sigatoka in the plantations where they applied water mixed with ozone.
According to Llerena, the black sigatoka, an endemic banana plague, is present in the 280,000 hectares of Ecuadorian plantation in the provinces of Guayas, El Oro, Los Rios, and Esmeraldas, so they had to be able to coexist with that disease.
Ecuador, the leading exporter of bananas worldwide, sells 7 million boxes a week to various markets in Europe, Asia, and America.
Llerena, 64, said he studied the effects of ozone because a friend of his who had a factory to sell water with ozone was going bankrupt and visited him to see his equipment could be useful in agriculture.
Llerena, who is also a producer of soy, palm, banana and cocoa, decided to use the equipment to spread the water with ozone in a small plantation, and starting his third year of research, five banana companies began exporting bananas that had been fumigated with his product.
The expert, who is member of the Spanish and European Society of Physiology, said that his product doesn't pollute and helps reduce pest control costs by 40 percent.
Another advantage of the methodology is that it increases yields by 25 percent because it releases the nutrients that are in an insoluble state in the soil and leaves them available for the plant, he said.
Llerena expects that, now that he has a patent, which was issued less than three months ago, ozone products, which are based on an allotropic gas that dissipates easily, will be used more: "There already is a group of banana producers that want to install this system."
According to him, the results of his product on the black sigatoka are immediate as this product is very effective against the fungus.
The University of Cuba proposed Llenera's discovery, which was financed with 350,000 dollars by the National Secretariat of Science and Technology, to the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee.
Llenera, who has a Masters in plant physiology, sustainable tropical agriculture, as well as studies in mineral nutrition and is a university teacher, said the water with ozone could be used in the irrigation channels for large plantations and that the hoses could be adapted to simulate an aerial fumigation.
Source: EFE
