ISLAMABAD: National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has started dispatching medical items to provinces for killing locusts in their respective areas.
According to the NDMA spokesman, 12 each spraying machines have been sent to Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan while six and eight sprayers have been provided to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Department of Plants Protection (DPP) respectively.
He said the affected provinces have been provided 350,000 litres medicine for killing the locusts. He said Balochistan has been provided 106,200 litre, Sindh 124,000 litre, Punjab 79,800 litre and DPP was provided 40,000 litre medicine including 300,000 litre methylene, 96 percent ULV and 50,000-litre Limda two per cent.
It is worth mentioning here that farmers in Pakistan’s main food-producing pockets have been haunted by a plague of locust swarms which are sweeping green fields with their devastating instinct to eat heavily.
Locust swarms triggered panic among villagers in Punjab as their crop was fine one evening but a lot of leaves had been eaten up a day later. They fear that if the situation prevails it would finish all cash crops, animals’ fodders and fruits like it did with wheat crop in Sindh.
The desert locust plague affected Pakistan’s southern Sindh province last year before moving to the rest parts of the country. The Ministry of National Food Security and Plant Protection and other departments all came up with a response to the fly attacks.
According to the food security ministry, the locusts have caused a loss of 15% to the winter-sown crops last year amounting to at least Rs100 billion, with fears that the damage would be huge if the next generation hatched. The report added that the locust attacks could cause Rs817 billion loss to the country’s agriculture production in 2020.
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates agricultural losses to Pakistan from locusts could be as high as $2.2 billion for winter crops alone.
