Big guns needed to stop armyworm invasion in its tracks

The crisis conference which began in Harare on Tuesday was centred on the threat to a very basic human need as potentially devastating in the African context as the Biblical plague of locusts.

The cause of the angst sweeping the continent’s sub-Saharan regions are fall armyworms. The armyworm starts as a caterpillar which matures, then attacks en masse like an army on the move – targeting the grains that are the bulk of Africa’s food supply.

READ MORE: Emergency UN meeting in Harare over armyworm outbreak

Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest prevalence of hunger by percentage of population, with one person in four undernourished and 23 million African children attending classes hungry.

The major problem seems to be the random nature of pockets of infestation of armyworms. It is speculated that the mature species can travel distances of more than  100km before laying their eggs, causing outbreaks to occur suddenly in areas that were free of the pests for several months. This makes occurrences of the spreading plague extremely difficult to predict and even more so to target directly until the armyworm has made its destructive surge across the fields.

Left to sweep in a spiral of destruction, this threatens to be far more than just an agricultural emergency of staggering enormity.

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