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ARTICLE: An army of worms is invading Africa

The following is an excerpt of an article posted to The Economist website about a new pest that is spreading across Africa, and how GMO technology could help in the fight against the pest. 

Africa has been invaded on quiet wings. First they landed by ship in the west. Then they spread across the continent, wreaking havoc as they went. Now, two years later, the invaders are worrying officials in almost every sub-Saharan country. It’s not the French, British or even the Chinese. This time it’s a simple American moth, the voracious fall armyworm, that has marched through Africa’s fields and is threatening to cause a food crisis.

When just a hungry caterpillar, the fall armyworm will happily munch on more than 80 plant species. But its favourite is maize—the staple for more than 200m sub-Saharan Africans. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that sub-Saharan Africa has about 35m hectares of maize grown by smallholders, and that almost all of it is now infested or at risk of infestation.

If the pest is not controlled, it could gobble up as much as 20% of the region’s total maize crop. Some countries may be particularly hard hit. The Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI), an association of agricultural research centres in 12 countries, thinks that big producers such as Nigeria or Tanzania could lose more than half their maize harvest.

Originally from the Americas, these worms were a plague there for hundreds of years. Yet American farmers have beaten them back with the help of genetically modified plants and advanced pesticides. By contrast, the worms are meeting little resistance in Africa. They were first officially detected in Nigeria in January 2016. Now they can be found in 43 other African countries . 

To read the entire article, please visit The Economist webiste