ISLAMABAD – Chinese ducks are unlikely to help Pakistan combat swarms oflocusts which have ravaged thousands of sacres of standing crop in the lastfew weeks.
After China’s Ningbo Evening News reported that an army of 1,00,000 duckswas on its way to Pakistan to tackle the locust menace, an expert claimedthat no such proposal was being implemented.
China Agricultural University professor Zhang Long, who is in Pakistan aspart of an expert delegation to help it deal with the locust problem,rejected that idea of the duck army coming to the rescue.
According to Zhang, ducks are not suited for the climatic and geographicalcondition of Pakistan, which is dry and has warm deserts.
“Ducks rely on water, but in Pakistan’s desert areas, the temperature isvery high,” Zhang was quoted as saying by The Guardian news portal. Hestated that chemical or biological pesticides would be able to do a betterjob than a 1 lakh-strong duck army from China.
Almost two decades back, China had used ducks to combat locusts ravagingthe north-western Xinjiang region.
Since ducks eat locusts, they can be used to deal with the problem facingPakistan but its dry climate may prove to be a major impediment inexecuting the programme.
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Several countries in Asia and Africa including India are battling largeswarms of locusts who can strip the fields of standing crops within a fewminutes leading to massive food shortage.
Locust swarms have been reported to fly as much as 150 kilometres in a dayand devour food which can feed 35,000 people.
The Ningbo Evening News had reported that China could send ducks toPakistan by the second half of 2020 where they would be used a “biologicalweapon” to destroy the locusts swarms.
The report mentioned Zhejiang Provincial Institute of AgriculturalTechnology researcher Lu Lizhi stating that “ducks were much less expensiveand environmentally damaging than pesticides”.
