What to beat boosting of food security as a national priority?

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According to the warning, a new, destructive pest was rapidly spreading around Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and other coastal areas in the country, wreaking havoc on all-important food crops like cassava and pawpaws as well as various ornamental plants.

The institute’s Tanzania office in Dar es Salaam reported that scientists had identified the highly invasive pest as the pawpaw mealybug, adding that it had also been spreading and causing damage in many Asian and West African countries.

We have not been updated on the matter, but we understand that the mealybug was first observed in Africa six years ago and had already spread to Benin, Nigeria, Togo, and Gabon.
Experts expressed fears that the discovery in Tanzania of these tiny, white, flat insects that sap life out of plants almost inevitably meant that the whole of the East Africa region was in harm’s way.

We are told that the mealybug’s preferred hosts are pawpaws but the insects also affect various other crops, among them cassava, beans, coffee, pepper, melons, guavas, tomatoes, eggplants, cotton and jatropha.

With this, it is easy to imagine the magnitude and severity of the disaster we would witness if we fell short of intervening as promptly as practicable with effective control or remedial measures.

The critical shortage of food now reported in many parts of our country, chiefly induced by successive months of drought, is enough reason for us to do the most we can to forestall invasions by the pawpaw mealybug and all other crop vermin that could expose us to even greater danger.

It stands as a blessing in disguise that the IITA alert has reached us relatively early – that is, before it caused very extensive or serious damage that might in part mean threatening the food security and incomes of tens of thousands of our farmers.

We don’t know whether scientists engaged in efforts to contain this invasive and destructive pest will by now have determined the full extent of the spread and the damage caused so far across the country.

It would also be interesting to know the ground covered by the Tanzanian government, IITA and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in mobilising funds with which to use biocontrol agents to contain the pest before it gets out of hand.

This is important because the National Biological Control Programme, a wing of our Agriculture ministry, says biological control is a cheaper, more cost-effective and environment-friendlier way of managing this particular menace than the use of pesticides.

If this eye-opening explanation by experts trickles down and boosts awareness among farmers and the larger public, we would have made huge strides in the search for solutions to hunger, malnutrition and poverty.

The awareness would help in enhancing crop quality and productivity, easing risks to both producers and consumers, and generally making agriculture more attractive and lucrative industry.

What, indeed, could matter more to a primarily agrarian economy than supporting the growth of agriculture, making agricultural products more profitable, and improving food security?