{Zambia’s President Edgar Lungu has called in the air force to help contain an invasion of army worms in maize fields, his spokesman has said.}<\/p>\n
Military planes are flying pesticides to the worst-affected areas so that crops can be sprayed as a matter of urgency, Amos Chanda added.<\/p>\n
The pests are called army worms because they eat most vegetation in their way and can destroy entire fields.<\/p>\n
They are devouring crops in six of the southern African state’s 10 provinces.<\/p>\n
“The president is concerned that if the outbreak of the worms is not controlled speedily, the crop yield for 2016\/2017 may be negatively affected,” Mr Chanda said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Four years ago, army worms destroyed maize, cassava, sorghum and rice fields.
\nMaize is the staple diet in Zambia.<\/p>\n
Production rose to 2.87 million tonnes in the 2015\/2016 crop season from 2.6 million tonnes the previous season because of good rainfall and early delivery of fertiliser and seed to farmers, Reuters news agency reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{Zambia’s President Edgar Lungu has called in the air force to help contain an invasion of army worms in maize fields, his spokesman has said.} Military planes are flying pesticides to the worst-affected areas so that crops can be sprayed as a matter of urgency, Amos Chanda added. The pests are called army worms because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100],"byline":[249],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-31444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-africa","byline-bbc"],"bylines":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"contributors":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31444"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=31444"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=31444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}