FAO targets East, Central African grain farmers for pest control training

The Food and Agriculture Organisation has embarked on a programme to sensitize farmers on migratory pest control in Eastern and Central Africa. The project mainly targets grain farmers as the UN agency's latest reports indicate soaring cereal prices on the global market occasioned by poor yields in developing countries.

Director Peter Opiyo said the training will benefit farmers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea. "We are targeting both small- scale and plantation farmers on effective use of pesticides and new technologies in pest control," he said. "Despite the pests great effect on yields, most farmers are still ignorant of their control as the pests become resistant to certain pesticides."

Opiyo said the programme mainly concentrates on the quelea bird, army worm and desert locust, which are mobile and can destroy large grain fields within a few days. Those are our main areas of interest, but we are also studying other pests such as the weevil, which destroy food during storage," he said.

FAO's chief engineer Beatus Matemo said the organisation had acquired eight aircraft in a joint venture with member states for spraying and surveillance. "We are using five planes for spraying and the other three for surveillance and communication," he said.

"The changing climate, due to global warming, has forced us to get closer to the meteorological departments in order to plan our prevention strategies," he said. They now collaborate to monitor suitable conditions for desert locust breeding.

In 2006 more than 34 million quelea birds were destroyed in Kenya and Ethiopia in campaigns spearheaded by their respective ministries of agriculture. Large flocks of the migratory Red-Billed Quelea can rapidly destroy fields of sorghum, wheat, rice and millet, threatening the food security and livelihoods of farmers.

Though each bird will only consume a few grammes of grain, flocks can number 100,000 and lead to the destruction of several tonnes of grain a day. Having a short breeding cycle and given favourable conditions, quelea birds can rapidly become a major pest requiring the use of specialist "avicides" for their control.