‘Minimise chemical use to deal with army worms’

The West Africa Coordinator of the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI), Dr Victor Attuquaye Clottey, has advised the government to reduce its over-reliance on chemicals to combat the army worm invasion.

He said excessive use of chemicals could be detrimental to humans and affect food production and that the government should consider other alternatives to manage the fall army worms (FAW).

“There are a whole lot of non-chemical ways of managing the worms; you can use other organisms that predate or parasite on the army worms. These things are all around us but by our regulations, bringing them in means that you must quarantine them and use in an exclusive area and see if it won’t behave like a pest,” he said.

Symposium

Dr Clottey made the recommendations at a policy symposium on the “Excessive Use of Chemicals in the Management of FAW: Implications on Sustainable Agricultural Intensification in Ghana.”

The Sustainable Agricultural Intensification Research and Learning in Africa (SAIRLA) organised the symposium in Accra in colloaboration with the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) as part of the Ghana National Learning Alliance (GH-NLA) of SAIRLA.

Dr Clottey recalled that although earlier action plan to deal with the worms by using chemicals saved the country a lot of money, their continuous use would soon become more expensive because they would develop resistance for which higher dosages would be required.

He also stressed that where the chemicals are used at all, it should be judicious, while alternative measures are considered.

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Pests

“We are not saying that we will totally stop using chemicals, but we have to use it judiciously, in the right way and at the right time and bring in other measures that will make us save on the chemicals and then we can sustain our agricultural production,” Dr Clottey said.

He said the pests were all around communities in the country and only needed to be gathered, brought together, quarantined and closely observed for some time before being released into the farms.

The CABI coordinator said that the alternative measures also needed policy and institutional arrangements between the local farmers and the policy makers.

It also required training and creating awareness on how to use the new methods without applying chemicals.