Chinese duck army to march into Pakistan

• China will send 100,000 ducks to Pakistan to help the country fight against the locust invasion.
• The ducks are planned to be sent to Pakistan at the end of this year or early next year.

Infested with the largest invasion of locusts in decade, Pakistan seeks the help of a Chinese army- an army of Chinese ducks to be exact to counter the issue.

As per reports, neighbouring ally China will send 100,000 ducks to Pakistan to help the country fight against the locust invasion.

Times reported that ducks, which are stated as "natural enemies of locusts", prevented an invasion in Sincan Uygur Autonomous Region 20 years ago.

According to Lu Lizhi, a senior researcher with the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the quacking fowl can be more effective than pesticide. “One duck is able to eat more than 200 locusts a day,” Lu said, citing results of experiments to test the ducks’ searching and predation capabilities.

It was reported that the ducks are planned to be sent to Pakistan at the end of this year or early next year, and a group of Chinese scientists have already arrived in Pakistan and will provide technical support to Pakistani officials in fighting against locusts.

Pakistan has been fighting the biblical epidemic for a number of months, swarms of locust are in Sindh and Balochistan since October and has destroyed considerable cropland.

Just days ago, MNA from Bahawalpur Riaz Pirzada told the National Assembly about the extent of the problem. “There is a big threat. If we have to declare national emergency we will," he said. In terms of locust existence, Pakistan has already entered “third category" and is just one step away from entering the last one, he informed.

Climate change and weather conditions play an important role in locust breeding, previously, the locust swarms used to move to Iran after sometime, but this time they are still in Pakistan due to low temperatures. Given these conditions, the locusts breed and multiply. According to experts, total number of locusts in a swarm varies from a few hundred millions to several billions.