LAHORE: The new desert infestation expected to enter Pakistan next month is feared to devastate cotton and rice (paddy) crops on tens of thousands of acres in Sindh and Punjab unless urgent measures are implemented to fight off the menace.

The new locust plague travelling from the Horn of Africa countries is forecast to enter Pakistan via Iran sometimes next month when rice crop will be in the flowering stage and cotton will be ready for harvest in Sindh and south Punjab.

The new swarm is projected to be 400 times bigger than the previous locust attack that damaged fodder, wheat, vegetables, mango, oil seed, pulses and other crops in February and March this year. The country came under the locust attack last year when the plague entered via Iran to spread in all the four provinces. This is the worst locust infestation in the last 27 years, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The delay in execution of measures to combat the threat from crop-eating pests also allowed them to breed locally in different parts of Balochistan and Sindh. The Punjab government has allocated Rs1 billion to fight the locust menace in its budget for the next year.

“We are facing a threat, which, in my view, is much bigger and more damaging for the economy than the Covid-19 plague,” Shahzad Ali Malik, a former chairman of the Rice Exporters Association of Pakistan (REAP), told this reporter on Wednesday.

“The locust infestations are not only threatening to jeopardise our national food security but also export earnings worth billions of dollars because this time around the pests will be targeting cotton and rice, the two major foreign exchange earners, if timely action is not taken to control the plague.”

He said the people could protect themselves from the coronavirus by implementing social-distancing measures. “But there’ll be no escape from famine and hunger that the locust swarms are threatening to bring at a time when the economy is already struggling under the Covid-19 losses.”

The agriculture sector contributes around a fifth to the national economy with almost half of the country’s workforce dependent on it for their livelihood. The government has been slow in dealing with the crop-eating hoppers in spite of cries of help from growers from all over the country. The Sindh government has also raised the issue with the federal government on multiple occasions since June 2019.

According to the Department of Plant Protection (DPP) officials the department had more than 20 crop dusters in the early 1980s. Today the department is left with just one without a pilot to fly it. Although the government has lately been using four aircrafts and six military helicopters for spraying pesticides for locust control but that is not considered enough to combat with the new wave of the hoppers.

Mr Malik was of the view that the government needed to acquire a larger fleet of crop dusters on lease from other countries as it was not possible to purchase new ones in such short time.

“If the government doesn’t want to lease the crop dusters it should borrow the army aviation equipment and modify them for dusting on a war footing as stopgap arrangement,” he added.

For the long-term, he said, the government should equip the DPP with a larger fleet of aircrafts to undertake aerial spray in such emergencies.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2020