A CHEAP, eco-friendly alternative to pesticides will soon be tested in Tanzania.
The African army worm (Spodoptera exempta) can reach plague proportions, with over 1000 caterpillars per square metre, and wipe out over 90 per cent of a maize crop. At the moment, the only cost-effective way to control it is to bombard it with pesticides, but these have obvious disadvantages: a 1990 UN report estimated that 11 million farmers in Africa suffer from pesticide poisoning each year.
A more environmentally friendly solution is to use a kind of nucleopolyhedrovirus (NPV) that infects only the army worm. Applied in large…
