Pakistan: 'Our Children Will Starve' As Locusts Breed

‘Our Children Will Starve’ Say Pakistan Farmers as Locusts Breed

Ismail Dilawar

Three swarms of locusts this year have all but wiped out Saadullah Zehri’s wheat crop on his small farm in the mountains of Pakistan's vast and arid Balochistan province. He’s worried about what’s coming next.

“Every farmer in the village has lost crops worth hundreds of thousands of rupees,” said Zehri, 33, a bearded father of six. But in the hills surrounding the village of Nur Gamma, two hours’ drive north of the city of Khuzdar, are hundreds of thousands of pods of orange-colored eggs waiting to hatch into a new plague in time to devour his most valuable crop.

“I’ll sow cotton on about 20 to 25 acres for the next harvest,” he said. “But I’m afraid these new locusts will come and destroy our crops again.” Planting of cotton, a mainstay for Pakistan’s farmers, textile mills and clothing factories, begins this month, with harvesting in October.

“Every farmer here used to reap about 100 to 200 bags of wheat, but all that has gone. The locusts have eaten it,” said Abdul Qadir, a farmer from Pashta Khan Moulla in Balochistan. He said there are at least 2,000 people in the village and all of them depend on income from farming. “If the locusts damage our cotton crop, our children will starve.”

At stake is the raw material for the textile industry, Pakistan’s biggest employer and the source of 60% of its exports. This year, the country is expected to produce 9.45 million bales of cotton, the lowest total since 2015 and 26% below its target. That means it will have to import a record quantity of the fiber.

There hadn’t been a major plague of the large grasshoppers for decades until numbers began to explode uncontrolled in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula in 2018. Over the past year, the swarms crossed into Africa and Iran and onto Pakistan and India, destroying harvests as they went. More than 140,000 acres of crops have been damaged in Pakistan alone since last April.

“This is the worst locust attack we have seen since 1993,” said Falak Naz, director general of crop protection at Pakistan’s Ministry of Food Security. He said a new generation of eggs is hatching that may also threaten India, as well as the fertile valleys of Punjab and Sindh provinces which supply much of Pakistan’s food. “The locusts will attack our crops in Punjab and Sindh again in May and June,” he said.

In the villages north of Khuzdar this month thousands of the yellow locusts filled the air. Females were visibly full of eggs in long tubes that officials said would soon be laid. Many more of the pests lay dead from insecticide or age, while others could be seen mating furiously in the ravaged wheat fields. Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah, a Balochistan agriculture officer, said each locust can eat double its weight.

“This isn’t wheat any more. It has turned into sand,” said Rehmatullah, the 50 year old caretaker of the warehouse. “Insects are eating it.”