ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has developed agricultural drones that will be used to fight locust swarms that arrived in Pakistan last year and are devastating crops, local media reported on Tuesday, a development the minister of science and technology has called an “important milestone.”
Pakistani media reports quoted the National Radio Telecommunication Corporation, a state-run telecommunication manufacturing company, as saying it had developed the drone which was now available for sale.
“Pakistan’s drone technology is among the world’s most modern,” Federal Minister for Science & Technology Fawad Chuadhry said in a Twitter post while retweeting a video demonstration of the drone. “The development of agricultural drones will be an important milestone.”
Massive swarms of the destructive desert locust entered Pakistan for the first time after 1993 in June last year, with the crop-eating grasshopper expanding its territory to 61 districts in all four provinces of the country, Pakistan’s food security ministry has said.
The invasion of the insects has been declared a national emergency.
Last month, neighbouring India said it had deployed a helicopter and a dozen drones spraying insecticide to stop desert locusts that have spread to over nine heartland states of the world's second-biggest producer of rice and wheat.
The United Nations has also tested drones equipped with mapping sensors and atomizers to spray pesticides in parts of east Africa battling an invasion of desert locusts that are ravaging crops and exacerbating a hunger crisis.
