Aug 29, 2024 8:00 am524 views
I can barely hear Esther Ngumbi over the roar of greenhouse fans as she shows me around her rooftop laboratory. The benches are full of tomato plants, and the tomatoes don’t look good. Half of the plants are submerged in bins of water. Their leaves are yellow and withering. Some of the dying tomatoes have flowered. I see one or two baby tomatoes on a couple of spindly plants.
This isn’t the only torture inflicted on the tomatoes. Someone has tied little baggies to their stems. Inside the bags, fat green caterpillars are chowing down on the tomato leaves.