China to send 100,000 ducks to fight locust plague in Pakistan
Swarms of locusts are threatening to devastate crops in Pakistan
(Web Desk) - China is preparing to deploy an army of 100,000 ducks to neighbouring Pakistan to help combat swarms of crop-eating locusts.
According to Chinese agricultural experts, a single duck can eat more than 200 locusts a day and can be more effective than pesticides.
Pakistan has declared an emergency earlier this month and said that locust numbers were the worst in more than two decades. Millions of the insects have also been devastating crops in parts of East Africa and South Asia.
China announced this week it was sending a team of experts of Pakistan to develop "targeted programmes" against the locusts.
Lu Lizhi, a senior researcher with the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, described the ducks as "biological weapons". He said that while chickens could eat about 70 locusts in one day a duck could devour more than three times that number.
"Ducks like to stay in a group so they are easier to manage than chickens," he told Chinese media.
A trial of this technique will take place in China’s western Xinjiang province in the coming months. After that they will be sent to Pakistan’s worst-affected areas of Sindh, Balochistan and Punjab provinces.
In 2000, China shipped 30,000 ducks from Zhejiang province to Xinjiang to tackle an infestation of locusts.
According to the UN, the current heavy infestations can be traced back to the cyclone season of 2018-19 that brought heavy rains to the Arabian Peninsula and allowed at least three generations of "unprecedented breeding" that went undetected. Swarms have since spread out into South Asia and East Africa.
