An outbreak of fruit fly larvae in oranges in Guangyuan, in southwest China's Sichuan province, has caused great concern among the general public and provided major headaches for fruit farmers.

This impact of the fruit pest incident spread across China almost overnight. In Beijing, tons of oranges remain unsold leaving orange growers to face one of their most serious challenges.

"The Beijing News" publishes a commentary written by Zhang Ming, a professor at 'Renmin University', who says the public are being too sensitive about the pest incident.

He argues that the harmfulness of this pest has been overwhelmingly exaggerated and experts have already proved that this kind of fruit fly larvae is harmless to people's health.

Meanwhile, the local government has said that the place where the pest outbreak occurred wasn't a major production area and the oranges were only for that specific local market and not sent for sale elsewhere.

The article says that in China, farmers lead a relatively poor life. As the global financial crisis causes economic downturns throughout countries around the world, farmers should be given a helping hand, rather than have their livelihoods trampled on.

To conclude, the paper says that the Central and Local Governments should immediately stop the further spread of rumours and adopt a series of measures to assist orange growers to put this incident behind them and get on with their work.