Capable Of 60Miles/Day, W. African Caterpillar Plague Crosses Into Guinea - Food For 350K At Risk

[hatrack]

MARTHA Kermel holds out stick-thin arms covered with a latticework of scratches from her encounter with a plague of caterpillars that has devastated crops and spread fear through a corner of West Africa.

"They scratched my arms when they moved," said Kermel, a mother of four, telling how the small creatures poured down on to her from the tree branches overhead as she set out from her village to a rice farm cultivated by her community in Liberia. That was two weeks ago. Now the millions of caterpillars that covered the road and nearby bushes have retreated into cocoons, or hatched into moths ready to spawn a new generation of grubs here or further afield.

The insects can travel up to 60 miles a day, and have already crossed the border into Guinea, an agriculturally rich country and the source of many of Liberia's food imports. That has set alarm bells ringing in neighbouring Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa grower and an important producer of coffee, rubber, palm oil and other cash crops. The creatures were first thought to be army worms, a moth caterpillar, but they were identified last week as the young of another kind of moth, the Achaea catocaloides, which is known to damage cocoa and other tree crops.

For the time being, the moths are headed north, and experts in Ivory Coast said they should miss the country's valuable cocoa belt, which produces about 40 per cent of world supply. But they remain a risk to Ivory Coast's central borderlands, which produce around 100,000 tonnes of cocoa and 70,000 tonnes of robusta coffee a year. For Kermel, the threat is more immediate. She and her family, subsistence farmers, like most people in the area, live ten miles south of the border with Guinea and 45 minutes by foot from the nearest passable road.

EDIT

http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Millions-of-tiny-scavengers-spread.4959154.jp

[jwirr]

1. I hope someone can figure out how to stop these bugs. This is a

real food emergency for much of Africa if they cannot and Africa has enough trouble in that area.

[Nihil]

2. Are they edible?

Seriously, I saw a programme the other day that showed how villagers
coped with the perennial swarm of a certain kind of fly: they caught
them, mashed them up and cooked them. The end result was a "meatcake"
that was tasty and higher in protein than a hamburger!

:wow: