Maize farmers have a reason to smile after ICIPE yesterday announced that it has found a solution to armyworm invasion.
The Cereal Growers Association last week warned of food shortage if the government fails to find an urgent solution to control the pest.
In a press release yesterday, the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology said it had discovered an innovation called 'push-pull' which can end armyworm invasion.
According to Zeyaur Khan, a scientist leading the innovation, the initiative involves inter-cropping cereals with insect repellent legumes.
Khan said the process involve planting an attractive forage, such as napier grass, as a border around this inter-crop.
“The inter-crop emits a blend of compounds that repel stem borer moths, including armyworm while the border plants emit semi-chemicals that are attractive to the pests,” Khan said.
The innovation will help control maize ear rots and mycotoxins and also improve soil fertility through quality fodder.
“Over the past several months, we received information from Push-Pull farmers that their fields were free of army worm infestation while neighboring mono-crop plots were being ravaged by the pest,” Khan said.
He said the findings were supported by farmers' observations regarding significantly reduced presence of armyworms in Push-Pull plots.
Icipe scientist Charles Midega said armyworm has a diverse range of alternative host plants that have enabled its population spread fast and persist.
“Efforts to control the armyworm through conventional methods, such as use of insecticides, are complicated because the adult stage of the pest is most active at night,” Midega said.
Midega said armyworm destroys almost 100 plant species, including sorghum, rice, wheat and sugarcane.
“The armyworm spreads very fast and can move over 100km in a single night and its capable of laying hundreds of eggs,” Midega said.
He said the pest had been constrained to the USA and Argentina for years, before spreading to Nigeria in January 2016.
“The pest has spread at an alarming rate across Africa and its presence has been confirmed in 28 countries while another nine suspect that armyworm has invaded them,” Midega said.
The International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) announced that it had found a solution to the deadly army worm.
According to the center, an innovation dubbed ‘push-pull’ could end the losses that the farmers have undergone since the pest was first reported in the country.
The move comes a couple of days after the Cereal Growers Association warned that the country could face an acute shortage of maize in the coming year due to the pest infestation.
According to statistics from ICIPE, estimates from 12 countries indicate that the pest had caused annual maize losses of between 8 – 21m tonnes worth US$ 6.1B.
In a release, the research body further noted that 300 million people in the continent have been directly or indirectly affected by the pest that was first detected in Nigeria in 2016.