Now, the Pakistani government has been dealing with this for a while now, rather unsuccessfully so. But as it turns out, us Indians are not the only ones good at jugaad!
Pakistan’s strategic partner China has plans to deploy 100,000 ducks to the country to help tackle swarms of crop-eating locusts, BBC reported.
Earlier this week, the Chinese government announced that it was sending experts to Pakistan to develop ‘targeted programmes’ against the plague.
Lu Lizhi, a senior researcher with the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences spoke about the scheme and told reporters that ducks were biological weapons. He said that while chickens could eat about 70 locusts in one day, a duck could triple that number easily.
Ducks like to stay in a group so they are easier to manage than chickens.
-Lu Lizhi
He added that a trial would be taking place in China’s western Xinjiang province in the next few months, following which the ducks would be sent to Pakistan’s worst-affected areas of Sindh, Balochistan and Punjab provinces.
However, a professor from the China Agriculture University, who is also part of the delegation Paksitan questioned the suitability of ducks in the affected regions since most of them are desserts and ducks need a lot of water to survive.
According to a report by the UN, these infestations could be traced back to the cyclone season of 2018-19 that allowed at least three generations of ‘unprecedented and undetected breeding’.
Now, if the ducks pull it off, that will be some story to tell, won’t it?