Orville Taylor | Beets me – army worm again

A little wriggling worm being antithetical to one’s livelihood may sound like a clumsy sequence of words, but there is nothing about that which is funny. To the east, St Thomas farmers are facing a predicament that, honestly, I believed we were on top of. Once more, the beet army worm, like insidious corruption, is crawling into onion fields and targeting this bulb and scallion. We already have run out of ‘thyme’.

‘Twas a decade ago that farmers in south St Elizabeth were up in arms as this little creature ate entire fields, not only consuming the crops and future of farmers who planted them, but the voracious pests even started eating watermelons and tomatoes. This is not second-hand information; much of the devastation and tears were seen first-hand as I drove through Southfield, Flagaman and the entire Pedro Plains. To date, there are many farmers who still have not recovered.

While it is true that man plans and God wipes out, there are too many bright people in this country for us not to have learnt lessons from southern St Elizabeth and taken those to St Thomas. After all, with the demise of sugar and the challenges in the dairy industry, it is doubtful that St Thomas can take any such hit. After what happened between 2008 and 2009, there should never be a recurrence. Indeed, there is nothing that eases the heart of the heartbroken farmers in Heartease.

In 2015, a report that more than $150 million was eaten up by the insect was followed up by another in 2017 where some 450 hectares of these crops were ravaged again. True, the government dropped $17 million in the bucket as relief. However, by August last year, farmers in the east were thinking of Independence and emancipation from their poverty, as they produced an average of between 22 and 38 tonnes per hectare. This was above the national average of 17 tonnes per hectare. Thus, with 100 hectares under onion production, the outlook seemed bright.

HERMAN THE WORM

And then along comes Herman the worm; and he was this big. In many ways, this noisome creature is like many other pestilences. We only find out after the infestation has taken place. The worm is actually a misnomer, because it really is a caterpillar, the larval stage of the small, mottled willow moth (spodoptera exigua) that we will easily bypass. These moths are not particularly harmful themselves. Apart from occasionally depositing dust and wing flakes on our suits, they do little else. However, the caterpillars are as greedy as your cousin who stopped by to ‘only spend a night’, but even eats the ‘bun bun’ from Sunday.

In one of several conversations that I have had with my eminent colleague, University of the West Indies entomologist Dr Dwight Robinson, my assertion has always been that, like many of our other problems; the solution to the army worm crisis is sociological and not purely biological. One needs to take a systemic approach in that behaviour, whether of animal or humans, must be seen in a larger social context and is always connected to other relationships, causes and effects.

The first manifestation of the infestation, unless the farmer has eagle eyes, is the tiny green thing, moving. As with any other insect, which goes through the multi-stage complete metamorphosis, there are: the eggs, the larva, the pupa (not to be confused with a male Jamaican parent) and the imago or adult (the moth in this case).

Our problem seems to have been that our farmers have consistently been overly dependent on insecticides, focusing on killing the larva. No joke here, but pupas are difficult to find after the fertile egg is planted. The problem with the overspraying is that Farmer Joe, in going for the overkill, often commits a massacre of wasps, spiders, assassin bugs, damsel bugs and others. Interestingly, some of these creatures are also food for lizards and other reptiles, which might themselves thrive and eat the caterpillars. Ironically, the larva hides pretty well from the pesticides, ‘wussalackahow’ they burrow into the scallion and onion stalks as soon as they hatch. Thus, with the elimination of their natural killers, the worms wriggle out after the spraying and dance in the absence of their predators.

KILLED THEIR SAVIOURS

Jamaicans, with our unnatural fear of lizards, might have unwittingly killed their saviours. But we could have saved millions by switching to gecko.

Killing the eggs works for some insects but not this moth. Protected by a mat of scales that would make a dermatologist baulk, these eggs are not the easiest to reach. So, as paradoxical as it might sound, the farmers’ overreliance on, or abuse of pesticides, could very well be their downfall.

So, how do we get past this hurdle? The solution is literally an ‘insects’ formula. Many a powerful man has been brought down because of his unregulated sexual drives. Proven to be very effective elsewhere, pheromone traps have worked like a charm. Set to trick male moths that they are going to have a good time, they are one-way trips.

Nonetheless, given that they are pesticides and thus need to be regulated by the Pesticides Control Authority, whose guidance helps the farmers to master the baiting process rather than their doing it alone, to their detriment.

In this crisis, which threatens food security, we need a multidisciplinary, multifaceted systemic approach. The right hands and left hands need to know what we all are doing.

- Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.