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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The storm brewing in India's cotton fields -Jaideep Hardikar

The storm brewing in India's cotton fields -Jaideep Hardikar

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published Published on May 4, 2018   modified Modified on May 4, 2018
-RuralIndiaOnline.org

Bt-cotton occupies 90 per cent of the land under cotton in India – and the pests that this GM variety was meant to safeguard against, are back, virulently and now pesticide-resistant – destroying crops and farmers

The black scars dotting the green bolls of a wilting cotton plant on Ganesh Wadandre’s farm carried a message for scientists working on the ‘white gold’: go find a new antidote.

“Those are the entry points,” said Wadandre, a five-acre farmer who is well regarded in Amgaon (Kh) village of Wardha district. The worm, he added, must have drilled into the boll from these points.

“If we crack it open, you’ll see a pink-worm devouring it from within,” he said, exuding nervousness and anger. As he cracked open the boll, a pink-coloured worm, less than a centimetre long, woke up twirling, as if to say ‘hi’. It had devoured the boll before the cotton’s white lint could form, leaving it worthless.

“A worm,” Wadandre, 42, said when I first met him in November 2017, “lays thousands of eggs and multiplies into millions of worms within days.”

Because the worm is inside the bolls, farmers cannot know of the hidden damage until the bolls burst. This can bring sudden shocks during the harvest and at the market yards, when the bollworm-damaged cotton fetches a much lower price.

Wadandre’s account spoke for cotton growers across Maharashtra, but especially in western Vidarbha’s cotton belt, through the winter of 2017-18, at the peak of the crop’s harvest. In this region, cotton is usually planted between July and August, and harvested from October to March.

Many hectares of cotton fields were devastated by swarming armies of the pink-worm. They caused damage not seen in 30 years. The fields around Wadandre’s farm bore the tell-tale signs of the pink-worm attack: black bolls, wilting and scarred, sprouting into dry blackened lint of poor quality and little worth.

It was this pest that drove the profuse and lethal use of pesticides from July to November 2017 across Maharashtra by farmers desperate to save their cotton crop, though they knew it would not decimate the pink-worm.

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RuralIndiaOnline.org, 2 May, 2018, https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/the-storm-brewing-in-indias-cotton-fields


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