Locust horde threaten Pakistan’s prized cotton farms

"We're done, there's nothing left!" says farmer Vikram Meghwar pointing to the millet stalks attacked by swarms of lobsters.

Like others in the town of Amarhar in the Umerkot district, on the edge of the Tharparkar desert, the Meghwars, a family of farmers, made noise with the cans and made as much noise as possible during the day, hoping to scare away swarms of lobsters from their millet crop. . At night, they lit smoking fires, but nothing deterred the voracious yellow plagues that reached the village last month.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), lobster infestation in Pakistan and the neighboring Indian state of Rajasthan will persist throughout October and then move to southeastern Iran and Sudan due to unusually monsoon rains. prolonged

Summer rainfall was unpredictably long and intense, says Tariq Khan, technical director of the Ministry of National Food Security and the Department of Plant Protection Research, attributing the invasion to non-seasonal moisture caused by climate change.

"The humidity in the atmosphere, the sandy soil and the vegetation were perfect for lobsters," explains Khan.

After three years of arid conditions, Umerkot saw torrential rains this season, recharging the wells and pushing the tall grass. Encouraged by soil moisture, the villagers planted their crops and were about to reap an abundant harvest when the lobsters struck.

A swarm (between 30 and 50 million lobsters) can devour 200 tons of food in one day. They can also fly a distance of 150 kilometers to find more food. Pakistan last saw lobster attacks on this scale in 1993. "Once they have devoured desert vegetation, they turn to crops," says Khan.

"The air becomes thick with these yellow insects, so that the sky darkens even when the sun is burning, it is quite surreal," says Akber Ali, 40, a school teacher in the town of Viklokar, whose three-acre cluster bean crop miraculously escaped pests.

Being a rainfed region, people grow crops only if it rains, says Zahid Bhurgari, general secretary of the Sindh Chamber of Agriculture, the largest farmer organization in Sindh. He estimates that 5,000 acres of millet, moong (green gram) and sesame have been destroyed.

Khan has been following the plagues since the beginning of this year, when the swarms were first seen at the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. "Due to the war in Yemen, no effort was made to control the swarms and they crossed through Saudi Arabia and Iran to enter Pakistan in May. After destroying the crops in Balochistan province, they had hit Sindh in June," he says.

"We need aerial spraying to prevent locusts from reproducing and we need to do so on a war footing," says Bhurgari. "Lobsters are laying eggs in uneven and high areas where sand dunes are inaccessible to land vehicles."

However, with only two planes, a team of 14 people and seven vehicles, covering all Sindh, it is difficult.

According to FAO, Pakistan campaigned to eradicate pests at the hopper stage and adult groups in the deserts of Cholistan, Nara and Tharparkar last month, covering 30,210 hectares, while the contiguous Indian state of Rajasthan did the same. in the hopper and adult groups, as well as in immature and mature swarms that spray control chemicals on more than 84,639 hectares.

Lobsters that remain undetected or controlled will form groups of adults and small swarms that could migrate in October and November to southwest Pakistan and southeast Iran, where rainfall is forecast from October. This would allow infestations to persist until temperatures warm up in the spring for reproduction, according to FAO.

"I think that temperature investments and changing patterns of rain and vegetation will make this happen regularly," says Pervaiz Amir, farmer and director of Pakistan Water Partnership. He says that the African agricultural sector faced similar drought and locust attacks. "Without aerial spraying, locust swarms can spread further."

According to Bhurgari, a female grasshopper lays between 80 and 120 eggs in a day, and the hoppers become adults in just 20 days. "If the government does not take action now, these swarms will go to the neighboring districts of Mirpur Khas, the Kunri area of ​​Umerkot and Badin, famous for mangoes, peppers and vegetables and wheat, respectively." it will be if the lobsters take flight to that side. "

So far, says Khan, crop loss has been "negligible" and the main cash crop, cotton, has been saved. "We continue to monitor the crops and the movement of the lobsters. There is enough vegetation in the desert for the lobsters to feed: they attack the crops only after removing the vegetation," he says.

Khan says that spraying with pesticides should be done very carefully. Being highly toxic and non-selective, aerial spraying can harm humans, livestock and even birds that feed on lobsters, he says.

Babar Bajwa, regional director of the Center for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI) for Central and Western Asia, says that there are environmentally friendly solutions to control lobsters, but they have not yet been tested in Pakistan. "Being a science-based organization, we are very careful that any new technology developed must be tested, tested and verified in a limited area before it adapts to the entire area. We do not want to cause further damage to the environment in order to eliminate a plague. "

Bajwa says "green" approaches take time, unlike the "fragmentary" approach of the government to solve the problem immediately. "I am satisfied with the oversight of the government department, otherwise, this problem could have gotten out of control."

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This piece originally appeared on Sci Dev Net and was reproduced in Dawn.com with permission on October 28.