KARACHI: Concerted efforts on the part of all federal and provincial departments are essential for the elimination of locust swarms, which are now in billions.

This was stated by Dr Choudhury Inayatullah, adviser to the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council, chief executive officer of the Worldwide Action for Revitalizing Sustainable Development, consultant of the EU and former assistant resident representative of the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP). He has worked on the locust issue in Sudan and other South African countries.

He was delivering an online lecture on Sunday on ‘Locust Attack and Issues of Food Security’, organised by the Sindh Social Scientists Forum and attended by other agriculture experts and representatives of the Sindh agriculture department and civil society activists.

“Pakistan may lose $8.71 billion worth agriculture crops during the summer season in case locusts destroy 75 per cent of the standing crops,” he said. It was estimated that if 25 per cent of the crops were damaged during the current session, the loss would be $2.9 billion and if 50 per cent crops were eaten up, the loss would be around $5.8 billion, he pointed out.

Monitoring of locusts and spraying on their breeding sites in Pakistan used to be a regular activity, but the previous year, the opportunity was missed, Dr Inayatullah said, adding that as a consequence of that the country was facing the worst attack of desert locusts which were present in all the provinces and 60 districts.

“Controlling desert locusts when they are in swarms is an inter-country operation and communication, and early warning to other countries is a key to success,” he said. “Spraying vast areas is not an ecologically sound practice because it kills all the beneficial insects, but at the swarms stage, it is the only way out. The use of semiochemicals is ideal when the locusts are in the solitary and transitory phase,” he added.

Currently, spraying of pesticides was being done in Pakistan through special aircraft, which had been donated by China to the Government of Pakistan. Explaining the history of locust attacks on earth, Dr Inayatullah recalled that its history could be traced in Egypt during the period of the Pharaohs and its mention was there in Islamic scriptures. In the recent history, he said, it started from African countries in 1993 and spread to Asian countries.

According to him, several chemicals (referred to as pheromones or semiochemicals) are released by the individuals, which help in bringing the mates together, keeping the nymphs and adults together, and signals all the nymphs to mature together and get ready for flight.

The expert said that he was involved in a research in Sudan, and the aim of the research was to disrupt communication among individual locusts at the different stages of its life cycle. “If the communication is disrupted then the swarms cannot form. It was exactly the same strategy which armies use to disrupt the communication of enemy,” he pointed out.

“I studied the individual locusts caught from South Africa, Brazil and other countries in the British Museum of Natural History in London, and I observed that they had the same morphological characteristics as those which breed in Red Sea coastal areas,” he said.

“Continuous monitoring of desert locust is essential for its effective control. At solitary and transitory phase, it can be effectively controlled by using light/sex pheromone traps, baits sprayed with lethal fungi and other pathogens on the breeding sites. My discovery of sex pheromone in the desert locust was new to science as it could be effectively used to trap all the males without the use of pesticides.”

“In other insects, the sex pheromones have been used to monitor its population as a trap and as spraying it over the entire field,” he said, adding that if spraying of sex pheromones was done on the entire field, the males were confused in finding the females, they moved/flew around continuously and ultimately lose their entire energy and die.

The main breeding area of desert locusts is the Red Sea coastal areas.

Last year, the above normal rainfall and temperature there were ideal for locust breeding and multiplication, which is a natural phenomenon. The second reason was man-made as the war in Yemen also played a role because their regular monitoring and control could not be practiced in war-torn Yemen. Consequently, locusts multiplied unchecked and its swarms entered in East Africa (Somalia, Kenya, Uganda), and other countries in the Gulf, Iran and Pakistan, he said.

Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2020