Southern Africa, which recorded bumper crop harvests last season, could face food deficits following prolonged dry spells and the march of the fall army worm, a senior Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) official has said.
Last week, the Eastern Cape department of rural development and agrarian reform confirmed the presence of fall armyworm in the province.
“The tell-tale signs are not good for this cropping season with the combination of delayed rains and outbreaks of the fall armyworm,” David Phiri, FAO’s sub-regional co-ordinator for Southern Africa, said in a phone interview.
“The biggest problem this year is less, overall, the fall armyworm than it is the sporadic rainfall patterns that are emerging. A combination makes the situation worse.”
Successive droughts hitting Southern Africa in 2015-16 led to failed maize harvests across the region. The El Niño-induced floods in 2016 washed away most crops, destroyed homes and livestock, forcing many countries to declare a state of disaster.
A regional bumper maize harvest in the last season could, in the interim, ensure food security, but another drought year could mean another food crisis.
The fall armyworm, a ravenous pest which has already destroyed thousands of hectares of maize crop across the region, was first detected in Western and Central Africa in 2016. To date it has spread to more than 28 countries on the continent.
While favouring maize, the worm can also feed on more than 80 other plant species, including millet, sugarcane, rice, sorghum, vegetables and cotton, making control a difficult task, according to the FAO.
According to Phiri, a sub-regional training programme has been rolled out to raise awareness about the worm among smallholder farmers in Africa. He said the biggest worry now was the evolving situation of the quality of the crops in the field due to the uneven distribution of rainfall across the region.
Some governments are in the process of crop assessments to get a better insight into how much damage has already been done by the worm. The FAO fears that even if the rains come, some crops will not recover to normal levels. “While we do have fall armyworm, our biggest concern now is the uneven rains,” Phiri said.
Most Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries will receive normal to above-normal rainfall for most of January to May 2018, according to the 21st Century Annual Southern Africa Regional Climate Outlook Forum’s mid-season review and update issued in December 2017.