ISLAMABAD: First batch of pesticides and other supplies from China arrived in Karachi, on Monday, to help Pakistan deal with its locust emergency.
The consignment include 50,000 liters of pesticides and 14 air-powered high-efficiency remote sprayers, and follows a visit by a Chinese team of experts last month, state run media said.
Pakistan declared a national emergency in February after the food ministry issued a warning that the country was facing its worst locust infestation in two decades.
It led to Pakistan and the FAO (UN’s agency for Food and Agriculture) joining hands on February 25 to tackle the issue.
In a meeting with Federal Minister for National Food Security and Research, Makhdoom Khusro Bakhtiar on Feb 25, FAO representative in Pakistan, Minà Dowlatchahi, discussed the options for chemical and biological control measures and a locust surveillance system introduced by the FAO.
Bakhtiar appreciated the efforts of FAO and “stressed on the need for developing an integrated work plan for controlling the locust without any time lag,” FAO said in a statement.
The emergency pesticide deployment from China is not unwarranted: home-grown cotton – which is being destroyed by the locust attacks – runs Pakistan’s textile industry which is its largest job provider and foreign exchange earner.
Desert locusts or short-horned grasshoppers, are the oldest migratory pests in the world. They have a high capacity to multiply, form groups, migrate over relatively large distances and, if ecological conditions become favorable, rapidly reproduce.
From the Red Sea coast of Sudan and Eritrea, the locusts first emerged in January this year. By February, they had swarmed Saudi Arabia and Iran before entering Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province in March.
Pakistani authorities estimate that locust attacks have damaged around 80,000 hectares of crop and pastures in Sindh and Balochistan and have also affected areas in Dera Ismail Khan in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The last major locust infestations in Pakistan were recorded in 1993 and 1997, though the government lacks credible statistics to quantify the damage caused in both instances.
