KARACHI: Until Monday evening, Rahmatullah Rajar, a farmer in Samaro, Sindh province, had big dreams as he was expecting the best wheat harvest this year. A few hours later the dreams were no more.
When Rajar went to his fields in the morning, he thought that by accident he had arrived at someone’s else property, but soon he realized it was his own 50-acre land, devoured by a plague.
“Suddenly, I noticed a swarm of locusts in the remaining field,” he told Arab News, “they had disappeared my crops which had come out up to three inches from the surface.”
Rajar desperately rushed to a nearby market to buy pesticides and save the remaining crops, but he still anticipates with horror what the coming days will bring as all irrigated lands in districts adjacent to the desert region of Sindh are under a massive locust attack.
The locust-exposed area comprising the deserts of Thar, Nara, and Kohistan covers approximately 68,000 square kilometers.
In May, the swarming short-horned grasshoppers were spotted in the Nara desert, prompting the Department of Plant Protection (DPP) at the Ministry of National Food Security and Research to apply insecticides. But some of the insects survived and started to breed out of control, spreading to Thar and Kohistan.
Desert locusts have been destroying crops in Africa and Asia for centuries. Their ability to move in huge swarms with great speed has earned them notoriety as one of the most devastating agricultural plagues in the world.
In January, swarming locusts emerged from the Red Sea coast of Sudan and Eritrea. Only a month later, they were already in Saudi Arabia and Iran. In March, they hit Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province. In May, they entered Sindh.
Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah on Monday confirmed that crops in 11 districts of the province were seriously damaged by the plague, and ordered to release Rs10 million to DPP to arrange three aircraft, fuel, and pesticide for aerial spraying in the desert area.
“We had one aircraft in Sindh, so we took another one from Punjab to conduct aerial pesticide spraying,” DPP director Muhammad Tariq Khan told Arab News on Tuesday. “Our department is tackling the situation in accordance with international standards,” he said.
These standards, however, impose limits as not all areas can be subjected to spraying.
“We can do aerial spraying in desert areas and we are doing it. But we cannot conduct it in inhabited districts, as the lives of people and livestock would be endangered,” Khan said, adding that ground teams were deployed and the DPP will control the situation as it did six months ago.
“It’s true that locusts are present in the desert areas of Sindh, but we are vigilant and will overcome the situation as we did it six months ago. Despite an army of locusts had come in May, we saved cotton crops. We will control it again,” he said.
Not all stakeholders, however, are as enthusiastic as the DPP director, especially with regard to the success of the anti-locust battle in June.
Briefing the provincial cabinet on Monday, Sindh Minister for Agriculture Ismail Rahoo said the locust control operation six months ago had failed as it could not be properly implemented due to financial and other constraints.
Farmers already fear the worst and are warning of possible food shortages.
Nisar Khaskheli, the president of a growers’ association in Khairpur, told Arab News that hopes were fading. “It seems we are proceeding toward a food emergency in our province,” he said, explaining that this time the locust plague may deprive them of wheat crops.
