The Ministry of Agriculture has said that it is in the process of buying 10,000 litres of Dursban, a chemical that kills fall armyworms.<\/p>\n
The chemical, according to the ministry\u2019s spokesperson, Hamilton Chimala, will be distributed to farmers in areas under irrigation farming to help terminate the fall armyworms which are threatening food security in the country.<\/p>\n
In an emailed response to our questionnaire, Chimala admitted that fall armyworms are seriously attacking irrigated maize under irrigation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not sitting back as we are purchasing 10,000 litres of a chemical called Dursban to be given to farmers. In addition, the Department of Agricultural Research Services in the ministry is evaluating mild synthetic pesticides that can be used to control the pest.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe also have local scientists backed by some from Brazil who are planning to introduce natural enemies for fall army worms as a biological means of pest control,\u201d Chimala said.<\/p>\n
In addition, the ministry is also using researchers to evaluate the efficacy of botanical pesticides neem, which is cheaper as it is available locally, according to Chimala.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoving forward, government will also be procuring \u2018pheromone traps\u2019 that will assist communities to monitor fall armyworms as an early warning system,\u201d he said<\/p>\n
During the 2016\/2017 growing season, Malawi and other six sub-Saharan countries suffered the fall armyworm attack on their fields, forcing many farmers to incur losses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Ministry of Agriculture has said that it is in the process of buying 10,000 litres of Dursban, a chemical that kills fall armyworms. The chemical, according to the ministry\u2019s spokesperson, Hamilton Chimala, will be distributed to farmers in areas under irrigation farming to help terminate the fall armyworms which are threatening food security in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":42906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49704"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49709,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49704\/revisions\/49709"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}