ANALYSIS
Uganda is under attack. It is under attack from the Fall Armyworm in what experts call a “biological invasion”. Unfortunately, it appears, the government was caught unprepared. It has reacted with a mixture of indecision, panic, bluff, and deployment of ineffective intervention. As a result, the farmers – who are at the frontlines to battle the new enemy – are poorly equipped, frustrated, and desperate.
Umaru Ddumba, who has 107-acre farm in in Makukuba Village, Nabbaale Sub County, in Mukono District near Kampala, is a typical farmer in this category.
When he set out to plant his 12-acre maize plantation, he was looking at striking a windfall of over Shs30 million from his crop. He expected to harvest 20 bags of 100kgs each from each acre, which would give him 240 bags. And if he sold each at 150,000, he would get Shs36 million. But today, when you get to his farm, what you see are shriveled plants, with leaves mostly covered in numerous holes of varying sizing as if they were shredded by grenade shrapnel and are still on fire.
The Fall Armyworm, a never before seen pest in Uganda, caught Ddumba by surprise. He had prepared for the usual maize stalk borer(ndiwulira) by setting aside Shs1 million for pesticides and spraying. Instead, by mid- April he had spent Shs7 million on fighting the army of worms – with minimal success, on a field he planted in March. He was looking to harvest in June but is unsure now.
“I have little hope of getting any sizeable harvest,” he says.
But he cannot give up. He continues to spray because he fears the worm may attack his other crops on the farm since he is a mixed farmer who also grows bananas, coffee, and pineapples. He also keeps cattle.
Failure of this maize crop means Ddumba is making losses over two seasons in a row. Last season, he planted seven acres of maize and was expecting to get 140 bags but instead got only 105 as drought ravaged the country.
Ddumba’s losses, however, could have an even bigger implication for the economy. Even before the fall armyworm outbreak, food prices had remained stubbornly high because of the last poor harvest. Failure of this season will mean higher prices and possible stock-outs and famine.
Yet Ddumba is not alone. The armyworm has ravaged over 60 districts out of the 111 in the country. Many of those not attacked are not maize growing districts.
Desperate fight
The farmers, frustrated that they have been left to fight the new invaders on their own, without help from the government, have resorted to desperate measures to try save their crop.
Brig. Kasirye Ggwanga, the maverick soldier who was once the political head of neighbouring Mubende district has a 200-acre farm in Nakisunga village in Mukono District which was still safe in April. As always, he has developed a theory about why other farms are under attack.
“When you do research you find that this worm has mostly hit areas where trees have been cut down because the moths fly easily in empty space unlike in our areas which are still forested and the moths are trapped by the trees,” he says.
But Mukono District Agricultural Officer, Steven Mukasa Mabira, reports that the some farmers whose farms are under armyworm siege are resorting to desperate measures. Some are spraying paraffin on the plants.
Others like Moses Nyanzi, who has an acre of maize in Bbuto village Bweyogerere, are using a mixture of Dudu Cyper (which they have been using for the maize stork borer) and paraffin. While the concoction kills the larvae, it also scorches the young maize.
But Ddumba appears to be the most determined. He says when he first realised his maize was under attack from the worm in early March, he immediately dashed to shops in Kampala city’s downtown area called Container Village which is a haven of agro-vet supplies. He was sold an insecticide concentrate called Stryker which is traded by the American company; Control Solutions Inc., and is known to kill a wide array of insects. It is also highly toxic to open water sources, and kills bees.
Ddumba was told to use 20mls of Stryker in 15 litres of water. But it did not kill the worms. Ddumba was possibly not surprised because Uganda does not have an approved directory of approved pesticides and retail outlets, meaning farmers are used at hitting and missing with fake drugs.
So desperate Ddumba hatched a new plan involving a cocktail of Stryker and two acaricides he was familiar with; Dudufenol (also marketed as Dudu Cyper) and Dudu killer (a chemical designed to kill termites and manufactured in neighbouring Kenya). They killed a few worms but not all.
Ddumba was excited when the government finally announced on April 10 that it was joining the fight against the armyworm and the Minister of Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, and Fisheries (MAAIF) Vincent Ssempijja, announced at a press conference at the Media Centre in Kampala that Shs4.5 billion had been set aside for the task.
The resolve of government appeared to be confirmed as Ssempija was flanked by Lt. Gen. Charles Angina, the Deputy Coordinator of Operation Wealth Creation (OWC); a major government project to alleviate household poverty through agriculture.
When Ssempijja announced three recommended companies to sell drugs; namely Bukoola Chemical Industries, Nsanja Agrochemicals Ltd, and Uganda Crop Care Ltd, he was not adding anything new to the fight. These firms were the ones selling the Stryker, Engeo, and Rocket pesticides the farmers were already gambling with.
Ssempijja also said the Agriculture ministry was procuring emergency pesticides, pheromone traps for pest surveillance and motorised spray pumps, and recruiting 3,000 extension workers.
Ddumba’s shock came, however, when Ssempijja unveiled only 2,460 litres of pesticides to be used by OWC officers for all affected districts. Each district was getting between 100 and 30 litres depending on the number of reported cases.
If, as Ddumba says, each litre sprays about 1.5 acres, the government’s effort was equivalent to using a bucket to put out a farm fire.
Later, the Executive Secretary of the Uganda National Farmers Federation (UNFF), Augustine Mwendya, said the government had procured plans another 60,000 litres of pesticide for distribution free of charge to farmers in the affected regions of the country. UNFF is a member of the taskforce which was set up by MAAIF to fight the worm.
But when Ssempijja was asked about the 60,000 litres of pesticide and when they will be distributed to farmers, he sounded cagey and insisted instead that farmers should buy pesticides.
Ddumba says a litre of Stryker goes for Shs32,000 at retail price and the wholesale price is Shs28,000. Since one litre sprays one and a half acres of maize garden, Ddumba who has 12 acres needs eight litres for each spray run. That adds up to Shs224,000 without the labour costs.
But when Minister Ssempijja was launching the official pesticides, he said it advisable to spray twice a day so as to kill the worm and eggs. At that rate Ddumba would be spending close to Shs500,000 for each spray run. Very few farmers can afford that. That means the army worn will continue feasting on their maize at leisure. And the armyworm is a mean eater.
Stealth eater
The armyworm arrives in the night in the belly of multitudes of gray and brown moths that recently popped up in maize gardens across the country. With nobody paying attention, the moths laid up to 1500 eggs per female in clusters under the maize leaves and moved on. Four days later the eggs, still unwatched, hatched tiny greenish caterpillars with black heads which immediately started feeding on the thin layer of the underside of the leaf to avoid the sun and detection. But by week two the caterpillars had grown to about half a man’s middle finger in length, with a thick whitish brown body and a reddish head bearing an inverted ‘Y’ mark. Unsatisfied with the thin layers of the underbelly of the leaf, the caterpillar soon pierced thousands of holes in the maize leaves, ears, and cobs. Since they fed mainly in the morning and evening when it was cool and the farmers were away, it was weeks before they were detected.
Older larvae cause extensive defoliation often leaving only the stalks of the maize plants. On some fields, the larvae also burrowed into the growing point ‘bud’ of the maize and destroyed it. The larvae feed on basically every part of the maize except the roots. The larvae eat the leaves, concentrating on the funnel-like areas formed by leaves. They also dig into the ears and even maize cobs. This means the maize is at risk at all stages. This goes on for between two weeks and one month when the caterpillars morph into the pupa stage in readiness to become adult moths and restart the cycle.
Finally the MAAIF did a demonstration on fighting the army worn on Ddumba’s farm. But the worms remain. Ddumba says they might have become resistant to the drugs. He says he has settled to using only Stryker.
“But I am also trying out several pesticide combinations,” he says.
A Ugandan agricultural scientist, Dr. John W. Bahana, who runs an agricultural consultancy, says the government should not have been caught unawares if it was running an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) system.
Bahana, wrote in a newspaper article, that he has 30 years of fighting armyworms under his belt. He is an expert in this area because he first worked at Uganda’s top agriculture research body, the Kawanda Research Station near Kampala and returned from doing similar work in Zambia. He explains that under IPM, traps fitted with chemicals that mimic sex emitting characteristics of insects are routinely deployed to capture insects from a distance as far as 20kms away.
“High numbers of male moths in the trap; say above 50 each night, will signal an outbreak,” he says.
He says the scientists would then collaborate with meteorologists to determine the cause of the high number of moths as they may have been caused by wind convergences. In any case, he says, outbreaks will be registered in an area seven days after arrival of the moths.
“The rest is no technical stuff,” he says and outlines some procedures; the farmers are alerted by local officials to search for the small worms, pesticides are supplied to as near the outbreak as possible, and farmers are trained on how to spray against the marauding insects.
None of that happened this time. The question now is whether the government will be better prepared for such an invasion next time. Scientists have been warning of this and since, as Bahana says, the fall armyworm is a cousin of the African armyworm, it could become endemic to the region.
Governments warned
In April 2016, several scientists working under several big-name global research organisations published a paper entitled ‘Global threat to agriculture from invasive species. The paper, which was edited by Harold A. Mooney and published in the journal, Proceedings of the National academy of sciences, surveyed 1300 pests to assess their potential to move across the globe and invade new territories. They warned that invasive species, such as the armyworm, threaten global agriculture.
“Overall, the biggest agricultural producers (China and the United States) could experience the greatest absolute cost from further species invasions,” the scientists wrote, “However, developing countries, in particular, Sub-Saharan African countries, appear most vulnerable in relative terms”.
In the survey, Uganda was ranked to be at very low risk compared to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Mozambique. But that was partly because the research based their extrapolations on global trade linkages of which Uganda has few. But Uganda should have been better prepared because the invasion of the armyworm is the second major biological attack on the country in about 20 years. The other was the water hyacinth which devastated Lake Victoria between 1992 and 1998.
Lack of vigilance means the exact time the army worn reached Uganda remains mysterious. Though some reports talk of September and October 2016, MAAIF in its statement says the worms were first reported in May 2016 with farmers in Kayunga, Kesese, and Bukedea reporting “caterpillars” that were destroying their maize. However, other reports say the worms were active in Uganda as early as March 2016. That would mean it took the government a whole year to confirm the outbreak. It would also be an indictment on the breakdown of the agricultural extension service. But Minister Ssempijja is defensive.
“This is a new pest and we had to do tests in laboratories here and abroad to confirm what it was before we could announce the outbreak,” he says.
What is known now is that the Fall Armyworm is a native of the western hemisphere; from the United States to Argentina. In the U.S. it is predominant in the south of the Florida and Texas states. But the fall armyworm, scientifically called Spodoptera frugiperda, is a strong flier and the moth can cover up to 2000Kms annually. That is how it gets about. It remains a mystery, however, how the worm crossed the Atlantic into Africa. A statement by MAAIF on March 27 said it could have been imported in agricultural produce.
In Africa, it was first reported in Nigeria in January 2016. Outbreaks have since been confirmed in Togo, Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
It gets the “army” in its name because of the marching behavior of its larvae or caterpillar stage which destroy whatever vegetation is in their wake completely before moving on to the next area. The ‘fall’ has to do with the season they thrive in best in their native home. The larvae in fact love cool weather and can last in that state for 30 days when it’s cooler and only 10 days in warmer weather. That rhymes with the life cycle of the worm, which is between 30 and 90 days.