Pink Bollworm Attack on Cotton, Crop Diversification Hit

The dreaded pink bollworm has attacked the cotton crop in Mansa, Fazilka, and Abohar areas of Panjab. In Bathinda and Fazilka, the Economic Threshold Level (ETL) is above the permissible limit of six adult pink bollworm pests per leaf. In Mansa and Muktsar, the infestation is still below ETL. Agricultural officials and farmers have observed the pest attack in fields where farmers grew moong in the summer. Farmers have started extensive spraying of pesticides to deal with the situation. The state agricultural department officials said the insect was spotted on plants being cultivated in villages bordering Rajasthan and Haryana. In some of those areas, farmers have reportedly started plowing back cotton plants into the fields. This is the fourth consecutive year some pest has attacked the crop. It must be noted that bollworm attacks between 1985-2002 paved the way for the Bt Cotton adoption in north India. Now the same seeds have succumbed to the attacks. On 18 Jul, Panjab agriculture and farmers welfare minister Gurmeet Singh Khudian sought Union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s intervention to speed up the research and grant of approval to the next generation BG-3 cotton seeds. Khudian also announced that farmers will get $83 per acre incentive for diversifying from paddy to cotton. However, if the crop is under attack and not stable, it does not make sense for farmers to shift. Despite the incentives in Panjab, in the first week of July, Panjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan have reported a total 1M hectares (ha) of cotton crop, a significant decline from last year’s 1.6M. Panjab’s cultivation has dropped to under 100K ha against 750K ha in the 1980s.