CURRENT AFFAIRS

Description

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Why in News?

Swarms of locusts have invaded vast swathes of land in India since April 11th this year. They entered several districts of Rajasthan via Pakistan’s Sindh province and the neighbouring State of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

This quickly growing swarm is now threatening to amplify into an agrarian disaster.

Hereby explaining about locusts, challenges associated with them and measures which can be taken to control the loss.

About Locusts

Locusts are large herbivorous insects that can be serious pests of agriculture due to their ability to form dense and highly mobile swarms. They belong to the family called Acrididae.

Locusts exhibit two interconvertible behavioral phases, solitarious and gregarious. The locust, individually, is a perfectly harmless creature. It does not bite, nor is it poisonous.

When rains return—producing moist soil and abundant green plants—those environmental conditions create a perfect storm: Locusts begin to produce rapidly and become even more crowded together. In these circumstances, they shift completely from their solitary lifestyle to a group lifestyle in what’s called the gregarious phase. Locusts can even change color and body shape when they move into this phase. Their endurance increases and even their brains get larger.

Locusts can become gregarious at any point in their lifecycle.

Salient features of Locust in Gregarious phase

·   Desert Locusts usually fly with the wind at a speed of about 16-19 km/h depending on the wind.

·   Swarms can travel about 5-130 km or more in a day.

·   Locusts can stay in the air for long periods of time.

·   Solitary Desert Locust adults usually fly at night whereas gregarious adults (swarms) fly during the day.

·   Locust swarms can vary from less than one square kilometre to several hundred square kilometres. There can be at least 40 million and sometimes as many as 80 million locust adults in each square kilometre of swarm.

·    They can eat as much food as 35,000 people assuming that each individual consumes 2.3 kg of food per day.

Environmental conditions for growth of Locusts

When conditions are favourable for reproduction, locust numbers increase and when they are not, numbers decrease either by natural mortality or through migration.

For the Desert Locust, favourable conditions for breeding are

(1) moist sandy or sand/clay soil to depths of 10-15 cm below the surface,

(2) some bare areas for egg-laying, and

(3) green vegetation for hopper development.

Locusts usually breed in the dry areas around Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea along the eastern coast of Africa, a region known as the Horn of Africa. Other breeding grounds are the adjoining Asian regions in Yemen, Oman, southern Iran, and in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces. 

Impact

Locust swarms devastate crops and cause major agricultural damage, which can lead to famine and starvation. 

Reason for deadly attack in India in 2020

The desert locusts usually breed in the dry areas. Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, adjoining Asian regions in Yemen, Oman, southern Iran, and in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces constitute the breeding grounds of locusts.

A strong Indian Ocean Dipole brought torrential rainfalls in the above regions.

The cyclonic storms Mekunu and Luban that struck Oman and Yemen respectively transformed the empty desert tracts into large lakes providing damp soils where the locust swarms breed.

Locusts generally follow the wind, and are known to be passive flyers. The low-pressure area created by Cyclone Amphan in the Bay of Bengal strengthened the westerly winds which aided the movement of the locusts into South Asia.

The westerlies also brought with them several bouts of rainfall over north and western India which also helped the insects reproduce.

Preventive Control Strategy

·   Regular Surveys: All countries affected by desert locust generally adopt a preventive control strategy for the management of desert locust in order to reduce the frequency, duration and intensity of plagues. This strategy consists of regular surveys to provide early warning and contingency planning to allow early and effective response before the situation becomes out of control.

·   Spray of pesticides: The Indian Institute of Sugarcane Research, Lucknow, advised farmers to spray chemicals like lambdacyhalothirn, deltamethrin, fipronil, chlorpyriphos, or malathion to control the swarms. However, the use of chlorpyriphos and deltamethrin has been banned. Malathion is also included in the list of banned chemicals but has been subsequently allowed for locust control. Special mounted guns are used to spray the chemicals on the resting places however it has huge negative impact on the environment

·    Innovative methods: Some of the immediate measures undertaken by farmers to break the swarm and disrupting them is by creating a loud noise, creating smoke or using cloth flags.

Why are Desert Locust so difficult to control?

Some of these are:

(1) the extremely large area (16-30 million sq. km) within which locusts can be found,

(2) the limited resources for locust monitoring and control in some of the affected countries,

(3) the undeveloped basic infrastructure (roads, communications, water and food) in many countries,

(4) the difficulty in maintaining a sufficient number of trained staff and functioning resources during the long periods of recession in which there is little or no locust activity,

(5) political relations amongst affected countries,

(6) the difficulty in organizing and implementing control operations in which the pesticide must be applied directly onto the locusts, and

(7) the difficulty in predicting outbreaks given the lack of periodicity of such incidents and the uncertainty of rainfall in locust areas.

Steps taken by the government

The union government is coordinating with states governments to restrict locust attacks. More than 200 locust circle offices and temporary camps are engaged in conduct in surveys and control operations. 89 fire brigades for pesticide spray, 120 survey vehicles, 47 control vehicles with spray equipments and 810 tractor mounted sprayers have been deployed for effective locust control, as per requirement during different days.

Everyday Locust Control Organizations, district authorities and state agriculture department officials under take control operations with control spray vehicles of LCOs, tractor mounted with sprayers and fire tenders.

Conclusion

Some experts worry that locust plagues will worsen in a warming world. Rising sea temperatures are causing prolonged bouts of wet weather, including a surge of rare cyclones in eastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula where desert locusts thrive.