A highly destructive pest that has ravaged one of the world’s most prolific crops in the Americas and Africa has been identified in India, causing scientists to raise alarm about its inevitable spread to Asia and Europe.
Indian officials issued an alert on at the end of July for the presence of fall armyworm, which has already devastated corn crops in the southern U.S., in Central and South America and since 2016 in large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa. The caterpillar with a voracious appetite is very difficult to eradicate and contain, prompting scientists to conclude that it’s only a matter of time before it reaches countries in the European Union as well as China — the world’s second-biggest producer of corn, often referred to internationally as maize.
The continued inability to control the fall armyworm’s spread has been particularly harmful in developing countries that don’t have access to safe pesticides or other preventative measures, or the infrastructure to identify the threat and rally a solution.
“It’s a very big deal — even more so than its arrival in Africa,” says Allan Hruska, principal technical coordinator with the Italy-based Food and Agriculture Organization, a U.N. specialty agency that closely tracks the spread of fall armyworm. “Asia has twice the area and four times the maize production of Africa. And the overwhelming majority of maize is produced by stallholders for food security.
“This is not Iowa,” Hruska adds.
Left unmanaged, the fall armyworm could cause as much as $6.2 billion in losses to Africa’s 12 largest corn-producing economies, according to a September 2017 assessment by the U.K.-based Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International, or CABI, funded by the U.K. Department for International Development.
Countries in the Western Hemisphere have had some success mitigating the effects of fall armyworm — which burrows into multiple kinds of crops but particularly attacks corn — through the methodical and safe use of pesticides and hybrid versions of crops.
Those solutions are beginning to fail, says Roger Day, program executive for Action on Invasives at CABI.
“Genetically modified maize was providing very good protection, but is now starting to break down. The pest is starting to evolve,” Day says.
Countries often react to the problem by dispersing chemical pesticides without regard for the harm they can cause to the produce or the farmers, he says. The potential harm is magnified in poorer parts of the world where farmers plant relatively smaller plots, making a 10 percent loss to fall armyworm much more destructive than for a large commercial farm.
The pest can only survive year-round in warm climates, like southern Texas and Florida. Its ability to fly hundreds of miles on prevailing winds allows it to reach as far north as Canada in the span of a year. Even if it likely couldn’t survive year-round in the northern reaches of Europe or Asia — yet — the fall armyworm each year will likely be able to spread there and elsewhere, such as North Africa.
“It’s a very mobile pest,” says Fred Gould, a professor of entomology and plant pathology at North Carolina State University.
Further complicating the issue is a political inability to address the problem, Gould says. Planting hybrid crops requires very specific conditions tailored to different climates, meaning a version of corn that is safe from fall armyworm in South America might not grow or have the same effect in West Africa.
“They just don’t have the money,” he says.
Since 2017, CABI has advised farmers on how to detect fall armyworm, and has been spreading awareness about the insect’s latest foray into India. Finding solutions to this problem, including helping local governments, may also mitigate similar problems in the future.
“This is a big thing. There are ways to address it, they need tailoring to the local environment but there’s a lot of knowledge we can draw on,” Day says. “This is the next in a line of things, and we need to take a more proactive approach to be ready to respond.”
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Discovery of Pest in India Stirs Worries of Spread Across Asia and Europe originally appeared on usnews.com
