Indian authorities are helping farmers mount a pesticide spraying campaign to fight the swarms of desert locusts which have already devastated crops across Pakistan and East Africa. As many as 700 tractors, 75 fire engines and almost 50 other vehicles are engaged in spraying pesticides to kill the locusts, Trilochan Mohapatra, director general of the state-run Indian Council of Agricultural Research in New Delhi said on Tuesday. Drones will also be employed.
“At this point it’s manageable, but if it continues it will be a problem” for monsoon-sown crops, said Mohapatra, who’s also the top bureaucrat at the department of agricultural research and education. The impact will be lessened by the current spraying campaign and the fact that the harvest of the winter crop is mostly over, he said.
About 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres) of cotton, summer pulses and vegetable crops have been affected by locusts across six states, mainly in Rajasthan, said Mohapatra. Farmers grow rice, pulses, cotton, sugar cane and soybeans on over 106 million hectares in the monsoon season, according to the farm ministry.
Pink Swarms
Swarms of desert locusts occur irregularly in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, usually when drought is followed by heavy rain. Normally, with the arrival of the monsoon, locust swarms enter the desert areas of India via Pakistan for breeding in June-July, but this year pink adult swarms were reported as early as April 30 in Rajasthan and Punjab, the farm ministry said.