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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India ignores UN advice to register biopesticides against locusts, still uses toxic chemicals -Nikhil Eapen

India ignores UN advice to register biopesticides against locusts, still uses toxic chemicals -Nikhil Eapen

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published Published on Jul 19, 2020   modified Modified on Jul 19, 2020

-CaravanMagazine.in

As swarms of desert locusts descended upon India this year, toxic insecticides were sprayed over two lakh hectares of land to contain their spread. But the measure could have serious environmental and health consequences. India’s Locust Warning Organization, or LWO, a body under the ministry of agriculture, uses fifteen different formulations of eight insecticides for controlling their spread. Five of these insecticides are banned, restricted or withdrawn in one or more countries abroad. According to the website of the ministry’s Central Insecticide Board and Registration Committee, nine of the fifteen formulations are highly toxic and the remaining six formulations are moderately toxic.

Locusts threaten food security and livelihoods of millions of farmers—even a small swarm can devour crops and pastures, eating as much in one day as 2,500 people. For over five years now, the Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations body, has been encouraging India to include the use of biopesticides—which are environment friendly—to its locust-management arsenal. In December 2014, India agreed to register a biopesticide named “Metarhizium acridum” at a session of the FAO Commission for Controlling the Desert Locust in South-West Asia, or SWAC—a regional locust-control body. But even now, metarhizium acridum has not been registered as a biopesticide used for locust control in the country.

When I asked KL Gurjar, the LWO’s deputy director, about this, he said that a request has been made to the FAO to supply a sample of metarhizium acridum. “The prevailing temperature in Rajasthan is more than 45 degree Celsius,” he told me. The LWO is responsible for monitoring, survey and control of desert locusts in Scheduled Desert Areas—spread across Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat—and Rajasthan sees the worst locust outbreaks in India. “At this temperature, no biopesticide will be viable or effective,” he said, before adding that there is “no practical scope of these biopesticides.”

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CaravanMagazine.in, 19 July, 2020, https://caravanmagazine.in/environment/india-appears-to-be-resisting-un-bodys-push-to-use-safe-biopesticides-for-locust-control?fbclid=IwAR0ey-_aUnemd9ivh6ZOWFmtz060mw9o5GvpPqVzoecBhRJyaSXXg5i189c


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