By UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) standards, the swarms of desert locusts currently devastating farms across East Africa, West Asia, and South Asia is already an “upsurge”—one level below of what is considered a “plague.” In India, states such as Rajasthan and Gujarat are facing its worst locust attacks in 30 years, and states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra that normally have not been affected are now facing locust swarms. But there is no data on damages to agriculture crop or environmental damages by any agencies till date.
To picture the devastation that a swarm can bring: there are 40 to 80 million adult locusts in each square kilometer of a swarm, which can eat the same amount of food as 35,000 people per day.
The current desert locust upsurge is being linked by experts to climate change—abnormally heavy rains in the Horn of Africa provided the conditions for the mass breeding of desert locusts. In general, however, pest infestations have been on the rise due to interlocking factors of climate change, monocropping and lack of biodiversity; and pesticide resistance.
At present, the primary method of controlling desert locusts are organophosphate pesticides recommended by the FAO’s Pesticide Referee Group. Although the FAO also recognizes that alternatives to chemical pesticides can be effective, the locust control paradigm continues to be dependent on these highly toxic pesticides. The Indian government, for instance, is stepping up locust control efforts through the spraying of pesticides, using the latest technology and equipment like drones and imported Bell helicopters.
Six of the eight pesticides approved for desert locust control in India—malathion, quinalfos, chlorpyrifos, deltamethrin, fipronil, lambda-cyhalothrin—are included in PAN International’s list of Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs). Governments and the FAO claim that desert locust operations apply pesticides in small concentrated doses referred to as ultra-low volume (ULV) formulation. However, PAN Asia Pacific talked with experts in India who say that massive amounts of pesticides are actually being sprayed—and with little or no monitoring of its effects on humans, animals, and the ecosystems.
“Government data says that so far, one lakh and 27,000 hectares have been sprayed. One helicopter can carry 250 liters of pesticides to spray in 25 to 50 hectares in one flight. This means if one helicopter had one sortie, there would have been 67,000 liters of pesticides sprayed at the minimum. Right now India is using 12 drones and 800 to 1,000 tractor mounted sprayers and helicopters. My estimation is at least 20 lakh to 30 lakh liters of these HHPs have been sprayed. But even then, reports say that only 60 percent of locusts have been killed by using these pesticides,” said Dr. Narasimha Reddy Donthi, a public policy expert and consultant of PAN India based in Telangana in India.
Anoop Kumar, an organic farming and horticulture consultant based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, further explained that a renowned soil biologist and his friend Dr. Sultan Ahmed Ismail had stressed the need to use disc sprayer in order to make the spraying to be effective, and the chemicals have to be broken down to less than 500 microns. “If the molecules are not small enough, it will fall from the insect and cannot be inhaled by the insect. So the effective method will be to use a disc sprayer, which can beat the molecules into fine dust-like water particles. But unfortunately regular sprayers are used most of the times, and so most of the pesticides just fall onto the ground and to other places that are not really necessary,” he said.
Groups such as PAN India are concerned with the impacts of the aerial spraying during desert locust operations. “Aerial spraying comes from Western countries where large farms exist in rural areas. But in India, there are no differences between farms and villages. We have very small farms, and villages amidst these farms. So the spread can be very wide and I think that’s a big, big concern for the people,” Dr. Reddy said.
HHPs used in locust control operations are toxic to all terrestrial and aquatic organisms. Most are endocrine disruptors and have proven carcinogenic and teratogenic effects. Some of them—such as malathion, chlorpyrifos, lambda-cyhalothrin—are also extremely toxic to children and can cause brain damage and reduced IQ.
As the desert locust outbreak continues and intensifies, alternatives to the intensive use of HHPs should be explored. The following are non-chemical pest control methods that have been practiced in India and could prove useful to controlling desert locusts.
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Biopesticides
According to the FAO, biopesticides present an ecologically acceptable and safe, low-toxicity alternative to conventional pesticides in desert locust control. It specifically cites the entomopathogenic fungus called metarhizium anisopliae acridum as the active ingredient, which can be used both in hoppers and adult locusts.
A recommended use of this fungus is for controlling locusts before they fully develop and take flight, or while they are on the ground during its grub or nymph stage. When the fungus comes in contact with the locust, it germinates, penetrates and develops within its body until it kills the insect. It can be sprayed onto the ground to prevent the eggs from hatching or to stop the larvae’s next stage of development.
In 2014, the FAO Commission for Controlling the Desert Locust in South-West Asia adopted a recommendation that countries should facilitate registration of metarhizium, after field trials in Afghanistan found that it is effective, safe and worked well under different temperatures. However, India’s Locust Warning Organization has yet to register it for use in the country, raising questions as to why it has not done so.
Other biopesticides that are used as effective organic pest control methods by farmers can also be tested as a means to control locusts. These are:
Neem– Neem oil makes insects not eat the crop, or affects their multiplication level if they do eat it. An
emulsion of 2.5 to 5 ml neem oil extract in 1 liter of water can be sprayed onto the crops.
3G (Ginger, Garlic, Green chili)– It is recommended that the juice is extracted from 50 grams each of crushed ginger, garlic, and green chili, and added to 5 liters of water. The mixture is sprayed onto plants using a surfactant. This will prevent the insects from eating the crop because it will be burning and hot. Some farmers make the mixture stronger by crushing 15 to 20 grams of garlic in 15 ml of kerosene and they will keep it overnight so the juice of garlic & kerosene mix together—then they will squeeze it out and add equal volumes of ginger and green chili juice.
Borax– Mix 3 grams of borax in 1 liter of water and spray onto plants. The mixture will stick onto the leaves in a very fine coat and when the insects eat it, their gut dissolves and they will fall to the ground in a day or two. The dead insects can then be collected, dried, and used as manure or processed for chicken or poultry feed safely.
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Pheromone traps
A pheromone trap is a type of insect trap that uses pheromones, or a chemical secreted by an insect that triggers a social response in members of the same species. Guaiacol, which is produced in the gut of desert locusts by the breakdown of plant material and is one of the main components of the pheromones that cause locust swarming, can be used to attract the insects and trap them. They can then be disposed of suitably as poultry feed or manure.
Light traps and frequency traps can also be used to attract insects to certain spots.
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Mud and water or “soil pesticide” technique
A farmer in Hyderabad was recently awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India, for natural innovation techniques in farming, which includes utilizing soil for plant health. He developed an organic method to keep pests away from farms using a mud and water mixture, which can also be used against locusts. Locusts cannot digest clay, so they will avoid crops sprayed with it or die when they eat it.
Also called the “soil pesticide” technique, 15 kg of topsoil (collected from a two inches depth) and 15 kg of subsoil (from a four feet depth) is dried completely, and then mixed with 200 liters of water. After allowing the mixture to settle for about 30 minutes, filter the top water with a cloth or sieve and spray or sprinkle onto the crop with a machine or by hand within four hours of the mud settling. For best results, spraying must be done at least once every 7 to 10 days (and once every four days for vegetables). Farmers can also spray the water first and take the subsoil in dry form and sprinkle or distribute like fertilizer.
Some farmers have added onto this technique. Along with the mud, they put charcoal powder or binding agents such as soap so that the mud will stick onto the leaves even after the water has evaporated.
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Collecting locusts at night
At night, locust swarms usually cluster on trees and plants, where they lie motionless until they take flight during the day. In Punjab, Pakistan, the agriculture ministry initiated a program to incentivize farmers who would collect desert locusts at night using nets. For a reward of 20 rupees per kilogram of locusts, locals worked all night to collect them. The program yielded 20 tons of captured locusts, which were then sold to Pakistan’s largest animal feed producer. Locusts are protein-rich and can be used as animal feed.
In order to be successful, desert locust control operations must be done at the large-scale, and non-chemical solutions would need government support as well as community participation, experts that PANAP talked with agree.
“One of the problems is that the government pushes toxic pesticides because there is a lot of convenience. If you want to make any of these alternative methods you really need to mobilize farmers and have a supply chain, and make communities participate in locust management. Whereas the government method is that they contract it out to some firm, which will use heavy duty machines to spray pesticides in huge quantities. What we need to understand is that the focus of the government is on ease and implementation and not on correctness. Long term capacity building is not being considered. We need to involve communities to fight this out. So far there are only small communities who have tried these experiments, but bigger states or enterprises have never really tried these things,” said Jayakumar Chelaton, director of PAN India.
Meanwhile, Dr. Reddy observed that scientific knowledge and research on locusts is not expanding. Available data and information is mostly limited to migration patterns, and there needs to be more research into the breeding, habitat, and food eating patterns of locusts for a better multi-disciplinary and community-led response. “There’s a suggestion to grow crops that locusts do not like in infested areas. But they are not talking about shifting cropping practices or mixed farming, methods which involve working with the community. The current global response wants to move away from the community and involve only government people and technicians, involve only technology and insecticides. This is a very narrow viewpoint,” he said.
Locust control operations have been going on for decades. Unfortunately, these control methods are focused on a narrow band of solutions, fixated on elimination through killing. And in the last 50 years, it has completely been about spraying hazardous pesticides—indicating the limitation of the current science and the inability of decision-makers to apply a diversity of methods.
Chemical-free alternatives can upend this toxic paradigm by involving communities in agroecological methods that can not only help mitigate the impacts of locust swarms, but protect them from the harm caused by conventional methods of desert locust control. Harm that unfortunately is not being considered nor measured in the race for solutions.
A comprehensive national action plan for effective surveillance, forecasting and managing of locust attacks that involve communities can help monitor the situation on the ground and give feedback to relevant government institutions. It can also become the basis for large-scale community participation and experimentation in alternatives to toxic pesticides.
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