by By Loucoumane Coulibaly and Alessandra Prentice
KORHOGO, Ivory Coast (Reuters) – Without pausing to wipe the sweat from their brows, workers in northern Ivory Coast picked cotton by the handful – saving a crop by using extra insecticides after a new pest damaged throughout West and Central Africa. last season.
The Indian cotton jassid insect or Amrasca biguttula appeared as if out of nowhere across much of the region’s cotton belt in 2022-23, injecting toxins into the plants resulting in a nearly 25% drop in production that year on a year. Some countries lost more than half of the forecast harvest.
“It destroyed us. It destroyed all the fields,” recalled Issouf Kabe Coulibaly, who along with other farmers in the Ivorian department of Korhogo was struggling to support his family and had run up debts due to this season’s losses spent
The crisis has highlighted the region’s vulnerability to invasive species and its reliance on chemical solutions that research shows won’t cost in the long term a crop that supports millions and is an estimated foreign currency earner for cash-strapped governments from Benin to Burkina Faso Faso.
This year, tiny insects like grasshoppers have been left behind using new pesticides that are being tested and approved.
Production across the 10 cotton-growing countries in West and Central Africa is forecast to hit 4.9 million 480-pound bales in 2023-24 – a 22% rebound from the previous marketing season, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said in the month of September.
By harvest time in late November, the sun fields around Korhogo were so thick with cotton bolls that they looked frosted. Working in a line, the workers pulled the white puffs from waist-high plants and stuffed them into sacks.
“If the medicine had not been effective we would not have had enough cotton this year. Thank God we believe a solution has been found,” said farmer Yaridiouma Soro, whose harvest was about two-thirds smaller than usual this season spent
FARMERS’ HESITANITY
When the full scale of the jassid crisis became apparent last season, cotton producers knew urgent action was needed.
“The scale was unprecedented. We have never seen this before … the year was catastrophic,” said Eugene Konan, head of research and development at COIC, one of the largest Ivorian cotton firms.
A lot was at stake. Cotton provides 8-12% of the gross domestic product of Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali, according to World Trade Organization data from 2019, when all four were the main producers in the region.
Experts from the eight-nation PR-PICA cotton production program met to find a solution before the planting season began in May, testing and recommending three new pesticides for farmers in the region to use.
“In the short term, it is the clear choice. This year they could not afford to lose 30 or 50% of production again,” said Thierry Brevault, who studies how to sustainably intensify crop production at the agricultural research center of French CIRAD.
Across West Africa, worried farmers treated their cotton with the new chemicals as directed.
“We had a product to fight the bug but we were all afraid – I reduced my surface area by almost 5 hectares,” said Coulibaly, who usually plants up to 15 hectares.
The USDA said a 5% year-on-year drop in cotton area in Ivory Coast and an 8% drop in Benin was due to similar reluctance and some farmers switching crops entirely.
The concerns were unfounded. At Coulibaly’s farm, workers threw bales of cotton onto a truck headed for a depot, where it was filled with huge streams – a testament to the effectiveness of the new chemical regime.
“We hope that all our producers will return to cultivation next year,” said COIC’s Konan.
WAS A SERIES
The bounce back may be short-lived, however, and researchers warn that more work is needed to find long-term solutions.
Insecticides should only be used against Amrasca biguttula with caution as known cases of resistance have been reported in India and Pakistan, according to the industry group’s Insecticide Resistance Action Committee (IRAC).
“In West Africa, the answer is still the use of insecticides … But it doesn’t really solve the problem. It’s a vicious cycle,” Brevault said by phone.
“Sooner or later we will face resistance. Eventually these products won’t work anymore.”
Priority should be given to the development of pest-resistant cotton varieties, expanding the use of monitoring systems so that chemicals are used only when necessary, researching alternative biocontrols, and learning how to combat jassids by another part of her life, he said.
The economic argument for investing in sustainable tools is clear. Biological invasions cost Africa up to $79 billion between 1970 and 2020, mainly due to the damage they caused, according to a 2021 study in the journal Niobiota that warned such costs were increasing exponentially over time.
“We can expect more and more new invasives to come to the region – to West African countries,” said entomologist Lakpo Koku Agboyi at the non-profit Center for Agriculture and Biology International (CABI).
He said this was partly due to weak border controls that allowed non-native species to hit an undetected lift from elsewhere and warming temperatures, which can shift species’ ranges or encourage their spread.
Genetic tests show that the new jassid in West Africa found its way over from Asia although it is not known when this happened or what caused the population explosion, Brevault said, ruling out climate change as a factor.
Some farmers in Korhogo are wary of the chemical approach to pest control.
“For me it is the pesticides that are not very effective,” said septuagenarian Navaga Tuo, standing in a field that was brown instead of white. He decided to plant maize this season after losing much of his cotton in 2022-23.
Encouraged by his neighbors’ bountiful harvest, Tuo plans to return to cotton next season and protect his crop as instructed, but worries about using more chemical sprays.
“We have to find a solution to end the jassids. Apart from agriculture we have no other profession,” he said, plucking corn cobs from dried stalks and throwing them to the ground.
(Reporting by Alessandra Prentice and Loucoumane Coulibaly, editing by Alexandra Hudson)
