A serious pest
Locusts and grasshoppers often cause extensive and serious damage to crops in many parts of Africa and Asia. Locusts are well known for their potential of invading cropping areas in swarms of millions of individuals leaving behind devastated fields and plantations. Luckily, these invasions are infrequent and may be followed by long periods of recession. In contrast, grasshoppers form a more chronic problem causing serious yield losses in most years.
Locust and grasshopper control: The environment at risk
Locust and grasshopper control is currently carried out with chemical pesticides. For many years, the product of choice was dieldrin, a persistent pesticide well suited for barrier treatment. However, concern about its negative impact on the environment caused it to be prohibited in most countries. Most modern pesticides replacing it are much less persistent and have therefore to be applied more frequently in blanket treatments and in larger volumes. So, even though they are less toxic than dieldrin, their environmental impact may well be worse. During the last major Desert Locust outbreak 1986-1989, donors spent 300 million $US, and 1.5 million litres of pesticides were applied. The international community became more and more concerned about this issue and has initiated the development of alternative control methods.
The biological solution
LUBILOSA has developed a mycopesticide called
GREEN MUSCLE® based on the spores of the insect pathogenic fungus Metarhizium anisopliae var. acridum. This fungus, which appears to be specific to species of short-horned grasshoppers (Acridoidea and Pyrgomorphoidea), is widely distributed in Africa and under favourable climatic conditions, can cause local epidemics in grasshopper or locust populations. Its biological and physical properties make this fungus an ideal candidate for augmentative biological control. Spores of M. anisopliae var. acridum can be easily mass-produced.
The state of the art
GREEN MUSCLE® is available either as dry spore powder or as oil miscible concentrate. It is applied as an oil suspension and can be sprayed using standard ultra low volume spinning disk spray equipment. The efficacy of GREEN MUSCLE® has been demonstrated in many field trials carried out by the programme and its collaborators over the past ten years, including aerial application at an operational scale. GREEN MUSCLE® is being recommended by the pesticide referee group of FAO. In South Africa the product was launched in March 1998, and has been registered. For the Sahel, GREEN MUSCLE® has been registered in 2001. Niger has launched GREEN MUSCLE® in August 2000 and is the first country which integrated GREEN MUSCLE® into it's grasshopper control operations. 2000 ha were sprayed against rice grasshoppers, with the support of Lux Development. Metarhizium production has been started by the company BCP (Biological Control Products) of South Africa and negotiations with another company have started for the West African market. The programme will provide the technical support for the production, registration and use of the Metarhizium with emphasis on advocacy among relevant donor agencies to ensure purchase of the product as an alternative to chemicals. The markets for GREEN MUSCLE® are expected to become established in three regions; for Brown locust control in Southern Africa, against Desert locust within the FAO EMPRES programme, and for grasshopper control in West Africa. However, GREEN MUSCLE® is a novel product and has unusual operating characteristics compared with chemical pesticides, hence there is scope for a vastly wider use of Metarhizium provided appropriate use strategies can be developed.
Do African farmers like it?
LUBILOSA follows two routes for implementation. Apart from implementation through governments, the project offers this novel technology also to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in West-Africa, active in rural development. These organisations work directly with farmers, following mainly participatory approaches. NGOs can contract plant protection officers, trained by LUBILOSA, as consultants for microbial grasshopper control. However, before proceeding to extension and marketing at the farmer’s level, possible sociological constraints need to be studied. Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRA) were conducted in Benin, Niger and Mali, in villages with a high risk of grasshopper attacks. The results show that in southern Benin, crops are in several areas under serious attack of the variegated grasshopper. Farmers were eager to participate in the mycopesticide trials. The trials quickly resulted in a reduction of doses and reorientation of the use strategy. In the Sahel, grasshoppers are a recurrent, very serious problem in many areas. Farmers in different regions express a constant willingness to spend 10% of the value of annual production on plant protection products. It is clear that in the Sahel, the product will have to be subsidised, as has long been the case for chemical pesticides. Overall, farmers as well as plant protection agents gave a very positive response towards the new technology once they had witnessed a demonstration trial. The slower kill by the fungus compared to chemicals is considered a problem, though people appreciate that the fungus is much more persistent compared with a standard acridicide. Its non-toxicity to farmers and livestock is also seen as a big advantage.
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