The six pests coming to eat your crops
Climate change is opening up new habitats to old pests, transforming them from a mere nuisance into a growing menace and placing unprecedented threats on the global food supply. Here are six bugs to keep an eye on.
Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera
frugiperda)
Found in: Africa, Australia, East and South Asia, and North and South America.
Eats: Corn, rice, sorghum, sugar cane, wheat.
Native to tropical areas of the Western Hemisphere, this invasive species has spread rapidly, causing “major damage to economically important cultivated grasses,” according to CABI, the nonprofit Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International. The pest infested about 15% of Zambia’s corn crop this year. It also contributed to a 4% decline in China’s corn harvest-a difference of about 11 million tons-sending prices skyrocketing and forcing the country to open its strategic stockpile, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Western Corn Rootworm (Diabrotica virgifera virgifera)
Found in: Europe and North America.
Eats: Corn.
These insects are most destructive in the larval stage, when they burrow into and feed on plants’ roots. This makes their presence especially difficult to detect: A plant’s root structure may be almost destroyed, but aboveground it can still appear normal. A storm may easily knock over the stalks, as happened in the U.S. this summer, when high winds blew down stalks across millions of acres of Iowa corn. The rootworm is also increasingly resistant to genetic modifications in corn designed to thwart it, according to the University of Illinois’s Farmdoc data center.
Coffee Berry Borer (Hypothenemus hampei)
Found in: Tropical climates-i.e., almost all coffee-producing countries.
Eats: Coffee.
These tiny beetles make their home inside the fruit of coffee plants, eating them from the inside out. The bug used to stick around lower, warmer elevations, but rising temperatures have coaxed them higher uphill. That’s affecting the more expensive arabica coffee varietals, which prefer to grow on the slopes. Controlling the beetle population requires careful, labor-intensive monitoring. And farmers, who are already seeking higher ground because of climate change-coffee plants are particularly sensitive to temperatures-are running out of room.
Desert Locust (Schistocerca
gregaria)
Found in: Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; plus a few cases in Europe.