As fruit fly can affect you, your neighbour or your community, the actions you take can have a big impact on the control of the fruit fly population.

Eradicating Mediterranean fruit fly does not have to be complicated, but it will take time and commitment from anyone growing fruit trees and an understanding of the pest and its survival strategies.

Management programs – such as area-wide management – are being used successfully worldwide in areas affected with Medfly. Area-wide management is an integrated approach targeting Medfly, with a suite of measures aimed at reducing their population to numbers where the economic impact on production becomes minimal and even, if numbers become low, eradicated.

For a successful program:

• the area managed covers all the area where the pest is present,
• a series of concurrent methods are implemented towards the same objective (reduction and/or eradication), and, most importantly,
• people become involved to implement the coordinated control of medfly.

Even if you don’t have fruit trees on your property you may participate in fruit fly control to reduce fruit fly in your area.

Help reduce Medfly numbers:

• Place traps on trees to attract and kill flies.
• Clean up fallen and infested fruit and remove excess fruit from the tree.
• Control Medfly all year long.

Talk to your neighbours. Coordinating control in neighbouring properties is as important as applying all the control treatments targeting each stage of the Medfly life cycle.