Feb 29, 2020
A lovely convoy of Chinese quack pest controllers- The ducks plans to fly to Pakistan.
In amidst of a struggle in dealing with the coronavirus epidemic, China has another combat to begin a battle to fight a plague of ‘Locust’ attack that has been gnawing East African countries. Locust are the oldest migratory insects ever known in the world attacking fields in thousands numbers and chewing away entire field.
An immense swarms of locusts has affected the standing crops of wheat in Pakistan, many countries in Africa, India and other places wiping out huge amount of crops and leaving many top producers and farmers high and dry. The affected regions are left without food.
To deal with the locust plague, some of these affected countries have taken steps to spray pesticides with the help of the drones. China shares a small border with Pakistan and has began to transport more than 100,000 ducks and ushering them towards the border with the purpose of combating locusts to thwart them from spreading and becoming a major problematical alarm.
Ducks act as a “biological weapons” with a great appetite for locusts. One single duck can gulp more than 200 locusts in a day, informed Lu Lizhi, a researcher at the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The army of ducks are to be deployed in Pakistan during latter half of the year, after a test in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang.
The recent locust infestation is the worst hit that Pakistan has seen in 2 decades. The influx of locusts’ threat hovers over the country’s wheat crop after it had ruined cotton crop in yester year’19. Ducks are cheaper than most pesticides, they are more effective and cause almost negligible hazard to environment that explains why China uses them.
Within China, in the year 2000, Chinese authorities sent 30,000 ducks to Xinjiang from Zhejiang Province to fight a locust infestation. Ducks prove to be better locust hunters than chickens because ducks move in flocks rather than in separate entities, plus chickens can ingest only about 70-75 locusts a day.
As Pakistan hailed for help, the Chinese government readily sent an army of quack pest controllers to take charge of the invasion and prevent locust plague by controlling the further spread of the outbreak. The affected countries are trying several remedies to fight the plague, including the deployment of ducks.
Zhang Long, a professor at China Agriculture University and part of the delegation sent by China to Pakistan, said that the idea is on an “exploratory” stage. Ducks rely on water, but in Pakistan’s desert areas, the temperature is very high, there are speculation doubting their effectiveness.
Cracking this locust plague through ducks will be decisive for China, as it shares a border with Pakistan. But over and above, China has an advantage because The Himalayan mountain range act as a barrier between India and Tibet, which can help the locusts from spreading.
The epidemic of locusts affecting Pakistan is related to the 2018-2019 cyclone season, causing steep rain in the Arabian Peninsula and yielding unstoppable breeding of locusts and since then the bevies have spread far and wide in South Asia and East Africa.
Favourable weather helps locusts to survive and breed. Female hoppers prefer to lay their eggs in sandy and moist soil as the larvae need such moisture to develop fully. Once the eggs are hatched, the larvae feeds on fresh vegetation to survive – this explains their hunger for the crops.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – a UN arm– has set off an alarm that if this epidemic is left unchecked or uncontrolled, the locust swarms have tendency to grow 500 times their current size by the month of June. Thus, speedy measures were recommended by international agencies which include spraying of aerial pest control by flyers and drones to slow down the growth of the locust and ultimately wipe them off.