Another locust attack

It seems everybody including farmers, analysts, even the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is worried about desert locust swarms, currently breeding in over 38 percent of the country, unleashing a second wave of attacks in all four provinces and seriously compromising Pakistan's food supply. Yet, for some reasons, there's little or no action, or even reaction, from Islamabad. The government did declare a state of emergency in February, but then just stood by as the pests multiplied on an unprecedented scale in pockets in Balochistan, Sindh and Punjab. Now, unless something is done immediately, FAO believes the entire country might be under threat of invasion, which could mean potential losses to the tune of Rs353 billion for Rabi crops and Rs464 billion for Kharif crops. Surely, the government would not have needed the FAO to tell it all of this, especially since the threat has assumed extremely severe proportions since last year. Still nothing has been done between then and now to control it, which speaks volumes about just where the government keeps food security on its priority list. Experts warned last year, when pests were found inhabiting pockets in all four provinces for the first time since the early 1990s, that unless controlled locusts would now breed over much larger areas, develop new routes of migration, and become that much bigger of a threat, yet nothing has been done to improve the official response mechanism at all.

To its credit, the Sindh government identified the trend ahead of time once again, and has been crying hoarse for help from Islamabad, but alas to no avail. In March this year, Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah wrote to Prime Minister Imran Khan, warning about a large locust attack expected around mid-May. He also sought the PM's attention towards the urgent need for fumigation campaigns against the advancing hordes of the pest, without which this year's carnage would be much worse than last year's. Yet everything, including the province's request for six aircraft for a spraying campaign, seemingly fell on deaf ears. The centre's strategy so far is rather difficult to understand, primarily because it has not been properly explained, but it must shift gears right now if it wants to avoid large-scale damage to this and next year's crops as well as its reputation. It will already have trouble explaining why it did not formulate a proactive plan after all the damage caused last year, especially since a repeat performance this year was pretty much written on the wall.

Nobody needs any reminding, of course, that this development has come when the Covid-19 crisis is already threatening food shortages on a very large scale. In fact, the FAO itself warned just last month, along with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that protectionist barriers as well as shortage of workers and transporters because of the coronavirus could very well lead to global food insecurity; even famines of biblical proportions in the worst case scenario. In such circumstances, governments are going the extra mile to keep their food supplies safe. And that only makes it all the more shocking that the Pakistani government decided to deal with the worst locust outbreak in three decades by burying its head in the sand. And, by not listening to provinces in desperate need of help, it is only making matters much worse. It will not just compromise the nation's food supply, but also bankrupt farmers, who are already among the weakest segments of society and must now also fend off locusts on their own.

The governments both, federal and provincial, clearly need to do a better job of working in tandem. The friction and lack of even a working relationship between the federal government and Sindh where it does not have an ally in power, has been of particular concern for quite a while now. Even in matters of life and death for a large number of people, like the lockdown strategy to contain the spread of the coronavirus, it seemed on a number of occasions that politics prevailed over policy. This friction obviously stems from the prime minister's personal dislike of all opposition parties, which has kept them from working together on anything at all, even in matters of extreme importance for the people. But now, when there are serious concerns about protecting the country's food supply, the federal government cannot just sit back and do nothing. It must immediately revise its policy and do everything it can to work with the provinces and control these locusts before any more crops are destroyed.