📰 India calls off New York meeting with Pakistan
India cites killing of three policemen in Shopian, issue of Burhan Wani stamp
•India blamed ‘Pakistan-based entities’ for Friday’s killing of three special police officers in Kashmir and called off the planned meeting of foreign ministers in New York.
•The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said talks in the current circumstances would be futile and also cited stamps issued by Pakistan in July in memory of Kashmiri militant Burhan Wani as a reasons for the cancellation.
‘Talks meaningless’
•“Any conversation with Pakistan in such an environment would be meaningless. In view of the changed situation, there will be no meeting between the Foreign Ministers of India and Pakistan in New York,” the MEA said in a press release.
•Apart from the killing of policemen and reported intimidation of serving police personnel by militants in Kashmir, India also took note of the postage stamps in memory of the slain militant Burhan Wani, that were issued by Pakistan. Sources said the MEA took note of the stamps on Thursday.
•“Since yesterday’s announcement of a meeting between the Foreign Ministers of India and Pakistan in New York later this month, two deeply disturbing developments have taken place. The latest brutal killings of our security personnel by Pakistan-based entities and the recent release of a series of 20 postage stamps by Pakistan glorifying a terrorist and terrorism confirm that Pakistan will not mend its ways,” the MEA said.
•The sudden cancellation came a day after Delhi agreed to Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s proposal for the talks, and announced that a meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi would take place on the sidelines of the annual session of the UN General Assembly in the next few days. Thursday’s announcement came even as India confirmed the murder of a BSF soldier by Pakistani elements.
•India’s decision drew swift response from Pakistan, with Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry telling reporter, “The entire world is watching that Pakistan stands for peace and dialogue and India is being led by extremist mindset.”
•President of Pakistan Arif Alvi described Delhi’s decision as “sad”.
•“Mutual reservations could have been placed on the table,” said Mr Alvi in a social media post.
‘Evil agenda’
•The MEA stated that the decision to go ahead with the meeting in New York was taken because the proposal from Prime Minister Imran Khan had indicated a desire to discuss ‘terrorism’ with India.
•“Now it is obvious that behind Pakistan’s proposal for talks to make a fresh beginning, the evil agenda of Pakistan stands exposed and the true face of the new Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan has been revealed to the world in his first few months in office,” stated the MEA press statement.
•Officials said the decision to cancel the meeting between the two ministers was taken after “wider consultation” in the MEA and with all stakeholders in the government.
•“The Postage stamps came to our notice yesterday night. We only verified this last night. We wish that the Pakistan government had done something to make the atmosphere better,” an official source said clarifying the abrupt cancellation.
•The decision to cancel the talks was taken as India sensed the contradictions in Pakistan’s stated position and its unstated agenda. “We got a sense that what PM Khan is saying and what he wants to do has a big gap,” said the source.
•The decision received support from the opposition. Abhishek Singhvi of Congress said, “Does it require any degree of competence to know that you don’t decide to resume dialogue on a day when they have murdered and mutilated a BSF jawan?”
📰 Ban on adoption by live-in partners lifted
May 31, 2018 circular had barred applicants not in a formal marriage.
•Individuals in a live-in relationship will once again be able to adopt children from and within India after the country’s nodal adoption agency decided to withdraw a circular issued earlier this year disallowing them from doing so.
•The Child Adoption Regulatory Authority (CARA), in a circular issued on May 31, barred applicants in a live-in relationship from adopting a child on the ground that “the Authority would like the children to be placed only with a stable family and individuals in a live-in relationship cannot be considered as stable family.”
•“We have decided to withdraw the circular and applications from prospective adoptive parents will be examined on a case-by-case basis,” Secretary, Women and Child Development Ministry, R.K. Shrivastava told The Hindu on Thursday.
•The decision was taken at the last meeting of the steering committee of CARA, chaired by Mr. Shrivastava, in August, and will benefit both domestic and international applicants.
•The eligibility criteria under Adoption Regulations, 2017, permit single women to adopt a child of any gender, while single men can adopt only boys. When a married couple seeks to adopt a child, it needs to give its consent for adoption and should be stable marriage for at least two years. Applicants have to be physically, mentally and financially stable to raise a child.
📰 Seeking a managed exit
A year after U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his new Afghanistan policy, the stalemate continues
•Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani was in New Delhi on September 19 for a day-long working visit. A short press release indicates the low-key nature of the visit. The reason is simple — the growing sense of uncertainty that prevails. Presumably, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took up the issue of seven engineers working for KEC International who remain missing after being kidnapped this May, and Mr. Ghani would have assured him about Kabul’s sincere efforts to rescue them. Pro forma references to the Strategic Partnership and the New Development Partnership were made but there were no new announcements. India reiterated its support for ‘an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned and Afghan-controlled peace and reconciliation process’ with the Taliban though it is clear that the strings are being manipulated from other capitals.
•A year after U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his new Afghanistan policy, the stalemate continues. Incidents of violence and civilian casualties keep going up. There have been high profile attacks in recent months in Farah, Baghlan and Ghazni in addition to suicide attacks in Kabul claimed by the Islamic State (IS). The Taliban leadership and the Haqqani network retain their sanctuaries in Pakistan and enjoy the support of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). In terms of population under control, there has been a slow erosion and the hold of the Kabul government is now limited to 56%. Repeated offers of talks by Mr. Ghani have been rebuffed by the Taliban, except for a three-day ceasefire during Eid in June. Parliamentary elections due since 2015 are unlikely to be held in October as announced. Presidential elections are due in April 2019. The experiment of the National Unity Government has not worked and the prospects of the 2019 election yielding an outcome that is seen as legitimate appear remote. All key players, including the U.S., have now opened their own communication lines with the Taliban.
Pakistan dependency
•The objectives of the U.S. policy announced last year were to break the military stalemate on the ground by expanding both the presence and the role of the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Operational constraints in terms of calling for surveillance and air support were eased. The Obama approach of announcing timelines for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan was replaced by a conditions-based approach. Pakistan was put on notice with Mr. Trump tweeting about Pakistan’s duplicity in being “a non-NATO ally” and providing safe haven to insurgent groups. Earlier this month, the U.S. announced that it was cancelling $300 million in military aid to Pakistan. However, it is clear that U.S.’s Pakistan policy, which has oscillated for 17 years between cajoling using pay-offs and punishing by withholding or cancelling pay-offs, has once again failed to change Pakistan’s behaviour.
•Slowly, the U.S. is realising the uncomfortable truth that it is unable to change Pakistan’s policy because Pakistan’s security establishment does not find such a shift in its interest. The Pakistani military and the ISI do not support the idea of a territorially united, peaceful and stable Afghanistan, never mind the public statements at international conferences. At the same time, the ISI is unlikely to support the idea of a complete Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. It remembers that after the jihad in the 1980s, when the Mujahideen leaders finally took control in Afghanistan in 1992 after the Najibullah government fell, they stopped listening to the ISI even as they started fighting among themselves. This led to the emergence of the Taliban, assisted and nurtured by Pakistan. The ISI prefers a controlled instability in Afghanistan where the Taliban enjoys some power but wants more as this keeps the group dependent on the ISI.
•The U.S. is unable to get out of this bind as long as it maintains a significant military presence in Afghanistan and therefore remains dependent on communication and supply routes through Pakistan. It is unable to take stronger measures such as directly targeting the insurgent safe havens in Pakistan, terminating its status as “a non-NATO ally”, sanctioning specific military officers or considering placing Pakistan on the list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism’. The U.S.’s dependence provides the security establishment in Pakistan a degree of influence in the corridors of power in Washington that has enabled it to receive over $33 billion over the last 17 years, despite the ups and downs in what can only be described as an unhappy marriage that neither side is able to terminate.
End game in Afghanistan
•This is why Mr. Trump’s earlier objective of “winning” in Afghanistan has been quietly put aside. The U.S. appears to be seeking a managed exit, leaving after a successfully conducted election so that the blood (2,400 U.S. lives) and treasure (nearly $1 trillion) can be justified as having delivered an honourable outcome. For the outcome to last, at least for some time, the insurgency needs to be curbed. Having failed to defeat it through kinetic means, the U.S. opened direct talks with the Taliban two months ago. In the past, the U.S. had refrained from doing so, maintaining that this would undermine the legitimacy of the Kabul government. It had therefore prodded Pakistan to deliver the Taliban to an ‘Afghan-led and Afghan-owned’ reconciliation process which did not happen.
•The first round in July, in Qatar, with State Department senior official Alice Wells was preliminary. The talks were explained as intended to judge if the Taliban is serious and thereby ‘facilitate’ direct talks with the Afghan government. It has also expressed concern about the growing presence of the IS. Last week, the Taliban made it clear that its demands include release of Taliban prisoners held in U.S. custody and a closure of U.S. bases in Afghanistan. With the appointment of former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad as Special Adviser, talks with the Taliban are likely to intensify.
•The IS argument was used by Russia to open up direct talks with the Taliban more than a year ago. Iran has its own channels to the Taliban. Both Russia and Iran believe that notwithstanding the ideological affinity, turf battles will ensure that the Taliban will resent the Arab-dominated IS. This happened in August in Jowzjan, where after a pitched battle, 250 IS cadres chose to surrender to the Afghan authorities rather than face summary justice at the hands of the Taliban. With U.S. encouragement, Uzbekistan has also entertained senior Taliban leaders in Tashkent to persuade them to engage in talks with Kabul. Concerned about Uighur militants, China is planning to train and equip an Afghan brigade to be deployed in Badakshan even as it seeks Taliban help in securing its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor projects. This has given the Taliban a new legitimacy — exactly as Pakistan had wanted. With the emergence of the IS, a distinction between good Taliban and bad Taliban is no longer necessary.
A shift?
•Realising that the end game is approaching, the Taliban too has changed tack. In the areas under its control, instead of destroying the schools, clinics and courts, it is running them by co-opting or replacing local officials who remain on the government’s payroll. It realises that it needs to emerge from being a shadowy underground insurgency and demonstrate governance skills. Mr. Ghani would like to stand again in 2019, this time as a candidate who brought peace to Afghanistan, though with so many different players pulling in different directions, peace will remain illusory. What is likely is that after the 2019 election, the U.S. will get its managed exit, which Mr. Trump will trumpet as his singular achievement.
📰 Overnight flip-flop: on the cancelled Swaraj-Qureshi meeting
The government must explain why it cancelled the Swaraj-Qureshi meeting
•Within 24 hours of announcing a meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi in New York next week, India called it off. The reasons cited for this overnight flip-flop are recent attacks in Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistan-based groups, and stamps issued by the Pakistani postal service that glorified Kashmiri terrorists. According to the MEA spokesperson, both acts “expose” Pakistan’s “evil agenda” and the “true face of the new Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan”, rendering talks “meaningless”. While the government is well within its rights to rethink any decision it takes, the reasons that it has furnished for cancelling the meeting are far from convincing. To begin with, there have been a number of violent attacks in J&K in the past few months which predate the government’s decision to schedule the meeting. Since the beginning of the year, 13 Border Security Force jawans have been killed along the Line of Control and the International Border, including the latest case on Wednesday of a jawan’s body recovered bearing torture marks. In the same period, more than 20 policemen belonging to J&K police have been killed by terror groups backed by Pakistan. The government’s reaction to Friday morning’s killing of three policemen thus appears puzzling. Equally bewildering is the subject of the stamps of Kashmiri terrorists; while there is no doubt that they are offensive, they were issued back in July before Mr. Khan came to power. The government needs to clarify its position on what prompted the cancellation of the meeting, not just for the domestic audience but also for the international community which is watching the India-Pakistan relationship very closely.
•The decision to cancel the meeting in New York dampens hope for meaningful engagement between the two countries for the foreseeable future, perhaps until the general election in India in 2019. Delhi and Islamabad should use this period to bring down tensions. In particular, the situation on the LoC warrants immediate attention. A day before the killing of the BSF jawan, a statement by the Defence Minister that the Indian Army is “also cutting heads, but not displaying them” only highlights the need to stop the retaliatory cycle. The new hotline just operationalised between the BSF and the Pakistan Rangers is an important initiative in this regard. India’s decision to call off the New York meeting is only the latest in a series of cancellations of talks with Pakistan since the Modi government came to power. There is little doubt that provocations from Pakistan, and the seriousness of the attacks launched by groups based there warrant a firm signal from India. But a credible position also requires consistency, which the government has not brought to bear on its Pakistan policy thus far.
📰 ISRO setting up launch pad for Gaganyaan mission
In addition to the third launch pad at Sriharikota, the space agency is also scouting for a new location near Gujarat for the Small Satellite Launch Vehicles.
•The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is setting up a third launch pad at Sriharikota to undertake the Gaganyaan manned space flight programme, an ISRO official said on Friday. In addition, ISRO is scouting for a location on the western sea coast near Gujarat to set up another launch pad for Small Satellite Launch Vehicles (SSLV).
Third launch pad
•“We have two launch pads currently, which are already full. A third launch pad is being set up for the human space flight. It will be ready in time for the mission,” a senior ISRO official said.
•In the Independence Day address this year from the Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that an Indian will go to space by 2022.
•Following this, ISRO has announced an ambitious roadmap to put a three-man Indian crew in a low earth orbit for 5-7 days by the 75th Independence Day.
•ISRO Chairman Dr. Sivan had stated earlier that ISRO has begun work on the manned mission in 2004, and that many of the critical technologies required for human spaceflight have already been validated through various tests — Space Capsule Recovery Experiment, Crew Module Atmospheric Re-Entry Experiment and Pad Abort Test.
•ISRO will use its GSLV Mk-III launch vehicle, which can carry the heavier payload of the Gaganyaan, and this will take off from the new launch pad.
•In addition to the third launch pad at Sriharikota, ISRO is also scouting for a new location near Gujarat for the SSLV.
•ISRO is developing the SSLV to offer affordable launch options for smaller satellites through Antrix, the space agency’s commercial arm. ISRO currently piggybacks smaller satellites on the PSLV and GSLV along with bigger satellites.
•The SSLV is expected to reduce the launch time as well as cost less to launch small satellites, which are much in demand.
•“We have evaluated several locations. The first two SSLV launches will take place from Sriharikota. After that they will move to the new location,” the official said.
•ISRO is ready to transfer the entire SSLV “as a whole” to the private industry while the agency would provide the initial hand-holding. The SSLV is expected to be cleared by next year.
📰 Ravaged by a caterpillar: on the armyworm invasion in India
First detected in Karnataka only in May this year, the fall armyworm, a native of the Americas, has already spread as far as West Bengal and Gujarat, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Priyanka Pulla reports on the deficiencies in India’s quarantine regime
•It is a hot day in September, and two men are prising open the leaves of maize in a field in Karnataka’s Chikkaballapur district. The crop is two months away from being harvested, but the leaves look diseased. Some have streaks of white on them, while others are peppered with holes. Soon, one of the men, entomologist Arakalagud Nanjundaiah Shylesha, spies the culprit behind these holes — a small greenish-brown worm with dark lines along its length and an inverted ‘Y’ on its head. It looks like any of the thousands of pests that infest fields in India each year, but this one is special.
•It is the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), a native of the Americas, which was first seen in Asia five months ago. Since its identification in the State’s Shivamogga district in May, the pest has reached as far as West Bengal and Gujarat.
•Shylesha shakes half-a-dozen of the caterpillars into his hand. They are of different sizes, which means that they are at different stages, or instars, of the larval life cycle. There are six such instars in the fall armyworm’s life, and between the first and the last, its appetite changes dramatically. Within days, it turns from a light feeder into a voracious eater that can wipe out farms. After pupation, adult moths emerge. As Nanjundaiah carefully transfers the specimens into a plastic bottle, his colleague, Sampath Kumar, remarks, “Not even a single plant is without damage. Oh my god!”
•Nanjundiah and Kumar, who are researchers at the the National Bureau of Agricultural Insect Resources (NBAIR), in Bengaluru, are a worried lot. Karnataka is one of the largest maize producers in India, and maize is the third most widely produced cereal in the country. This isn’t the first time a foreign visitor is poised to wreak havoc on Indian farms. In 2008, the papaya mealybug, a central American native, entered the country and destroyed plantations in several States. Then, in 2014, the tomato pinworm, or Tuta absoluta, a South American moth, was spotted in Karnataka. Within a couple of years, it had reached Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi and other regions, where it caused widespread damage to tomato crop.
•Such alien species which migrate to a new geography from their native lands can be a huge risk to both agriculture and wildlife. They could be insects, trees, weeds or viruses. Many of them tend to die out in new environments. Some become naturalised, like a few eucalyptus species have in India. Naturalised aliens maintain their population and do not pose a great risk to biodiversity.
•But a small percentage of aliens, like the fall armyworm, turn invasive, which means they spread uncontrollably. The absence of natural predators from their original homes allows them to disrupt ecosystems and cause massive economic losses. In 2016, a paper published in Nature Communications, titled ‘Massive yet grossly underestimated global costs of invasive insects’, calculated that such attacks cost the world around $70 billion a year.
•Such destruction is why countries take strong measures to prevent the entry of these pests. The first line of defence is a quarantine system, under which imports of grains and plants that can host such insects are inspected at shipping ports, airports and land border crossings. In India, this responsibility lies with the Directorate of Plant Protection, Quarantine & Storage, with its headquarters in Faridabad, Haryana. Unfortunately, many agriculture researchers say, the directorate is failing in its task of policing Indian borders. It is short-staffed and hamstrung by the lack of a strong legislation.
Voracious pests
•The earliest published reports of widespread destruction by the fall armyworm come from Georgia, U.S. in the 18th century. One of the worst attacks occurred in 1912, and a farmer’s bulletin of the time describes it thus: “The pest swept almost the entire U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains, utterly destroyed the corn and millet in the southern U.S., severely injured cotton and truck crops, and destroyed grass on lawns in cities as if by magic.” The fall armyworm was known as a particularly voracious pest. Though it preferred maize, it ate nearly 80 other plants. Even today, when farmers have learnt to check damage with integrated pest management and genetically modified crops, it continues to be a major cereal pest in both North and South America.
•So, nobody was particularly pleased when, in 2016, the pest turned up in the west African country of Nigeria. Initially, farmers confused it with another Spodopteraspecies native to the region. But as the situation grew worse, the alien visitor was identified. Today, two years later, the pest has spread to 43 countries on the continent. Nearly 200 million people here depend on maize for nutrition, and they are all at risk from the little brown caterpillar.
•It is proving expensive to control. In June, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations said it had invested $20 million in controlling the pest in Africa, and was looking for another $23 million. There are several reasons why the armyworm is thriving: it reproduces rapidly, and the continent’s tropical and sub-tropical climates allow it to feed all year round. In contrast, fall armyworms die in Canada’s frigid winters. So, each summer, new populations of the moth migrate to Southern Canada from warmer states in the U.S. like Texas. Such migration isn’t hard for them; the Spodoptera moth is known to be able to fly around 1,400 km. This is another reason why it spread so quickly to new countries after it landed on African shores.
•But how did the armyworm get to Africa in the first place? Nobody knows. Researchers speculate that it might have hitched a ride in cargo containers on commercial aircraft or in someone’s cabin baggage. There is enough evidence that the pest is capable of this. According to the European Union Notification System for Plant Health Interceptions, Spodoptera frugiperda was intercepted 14 times by EU quarantine officers in 2017. It was caught piggybacking on all kinds of organic material — flowers from Kenya, bonnet peppers from Mexico, and cucurbits from Suriname, to name a few.
India’s quarantine system
•To get into India, the fall armyworm would have either had to fly here, or make it past India’s plant quarantine system. This system is built around the Plant Quarantine (Regulation of Import into India) Order of 2003. The order, in turn, is notified under an Act that is over a century old: The Destructive Insects and Pests Act of 1914.
•Under the Plant Quarantine Order, grains or plant material can come to India only through notified points of entry. These include 44 sea ports, 23 airports, 19 land frontier stations, as well as foreign post offices and container depots. Imports at each of these points is to be inspected by officers from the Directorate of Plant Protection. But this system isn’t watertight. The first problem is that the directorate lacks key experts at some of these ports, says Celia Challam Vasimalla, a biosecurity researcher at New Delhi’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR). Some quarantine stations do not have nematologists (scientists who study roundworms) while others are missing virologists. When virologists are present, they may not have equipment such as ELISA testing kits for detecting viruses. This makes it likely that they will miss key pests.
•There are also gaps in regulating the import of plant materials by individual passengers. Under the Quarantine order, around 2 kg of cut flowers and dry fruits are exempt, but any seeds or larger quantities of flowers must be accompanied by a certificate declaring that they are free of pests and microbes. If not, passengers arriving at international airports are required to declare them. Says Shylesha of the NBAIR, “99% of the people don’t do that. If they do, they will have to stand in line, and time is wasted.”
•In 2012, in the wake of the papaya mealybug infestations across India, the then Director of NBAIR, N.K. Krishna Kumar, wrote to the Chief Secretary of Karnataka asking for quarantine systems to be strengthened at the internationals airports in the State (Bengaluru and Mangaluru). The letter asked for prominent signboards in airports warning passengers of the dangers of bringing exotic fruits and flowers into the country. It also asked for better training of plant quarantine officers and for providing them with equipment to detect dangerous species. Much of this hasn’t happened yet.
•Not all airport quarantines systems are as ineffective as India’s though. The Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS), for example, employs sniffer dogs to detect agricultural material on passengers. It also has scanners that can detect organic material such as seeds in baggage. Several Indian airports do not have this, says Vasimalla. When such items are found, stringent penalties are necessary. In 2002, Indian cricketers Harbhajan Singh and Saurav Ganguly famously paid fines of NZ $200 at Auckland airport in New Zealand for not declaring mud on their footwear. India would do well to adopt some of these practices, says Kavita Gupta, a biosecurity researcher, also from the NBPGR: “If other countries have done it, why can’t we?”
Time for a new law?
•To be fair, however, Indian legislation is a stumbling block for quarantine officers. Because the Destructive Insects and Pests Act is subsidiary to the Customs Act, 1962, quarantine officers must wait for customs officers to flag suspicious goods before they can check them. In other words, quarantine officials do not have the power to search and seize in India. “But the customs officer may not suspect anything, because what they are looking for is entirely different. Their focus is on items such as gold and narcotic drugs. This is completely different from what a quarantine officer wants to examine,” Gupta points out.
•In 2013, after widespread recognition of the lapses in the current quarantine system, a new Bill called the Agricultural Biosecurity Bill was tabled in the Lok Sabha. The Bill borrowed from some of the most stringent quarantine regimes in the world, such as the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. Unlike India’s Directorate of Plant Protection, Quarantine and Storage which comes under the Ministry of Agriculture, the U.S.’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and AQIS are autonomous bodies. The Bill envisaged setting up a similar body in India, called the Agricultural Biosafety Authority of India. Quarantine officers would have wider powers under this Bill. And the authority could even penalise States for not following its directions in controlling an invasive species outbreak. But as of today, this Bill has lapsed.
•Could a stronger quarantine system have prevented the fall armyworm from entering India? It is hard to say, because no system can stop the entry of new species with cent per cent effectiveness. The question is whether the risk of introduction is as low as possible. In response to this question, D.D.K. Sharma, plant security adviser, who heads the Directorate of Plant Protection, Quarantine and Storage told The Hindu that at least in the fall armyworm’s case, there wasn’t much that the Directorate could have done. According to him, the pest cannot survive in shipments of grains, because it needs fresh plant material to survive. “We hardly import any such material,” he said.
•But Sharma’s statements contradict what other entomologists say. According to C.M. Kalleshwara Swamy from the University of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences, at Shivamogga in Karnataka, this caterpillar has several stages in its life cycle, during which it does not need food to survive. Out of these stages, the pupal and adult moth stages can survive for days without food. Such pupae or moths could easily have hitched a ride on maize shipments into India, argues Swamy.
•In 2018 alone, India imported 500 million tonnes of maize. Further, the experience of the European Union shows that armyworms can survive on fresh fruits and vegetables too. India’s imports of fresh fruits and vegetables are not high, but they are not non-existent either. According to the data from the Ministry of Food Processing Industries, in 2016-17, India’s imports of edible vegetables were worth $1,371 million.
The rise in invasives
•Some researchers have argued that India has traditionally been extra vulnerable to invasive species because of its history of political invasions. From the Mughals to the British and the Portuguese, everyone brought their share of noxious weeds, insects and trees. Consider the case of the Lantana species, camara, which was first introduced by the British as an ornamental hedge in the 19th century. Today, it is widespread across India and threatens biodiversity by taking over forest understorey and grabbing resources from other species. Another invasive, congress grass, is thought to have piggybacked via wheat shipments from the U.S. under the 1950s PL-480 Food for Peace program.
•But the entry of invasives has been rising the world over in the last few decades, and one likely reason is increased trade. Several studies have explored the link between the two. A 2007 analysis of invasive species present in 227 countries found that out of several factors such as a country’s population density and amount of cropland, it was the degree of international trade that best predicted the number of invasives.
•In India, data from NBAIR list the entry of several invasive species since 2001: Australia’s eucalyptus gall wasp, Sri Lanka’s sapota seed borer, the South American tomato pinworm, and the papaya mealybug.
•The papaya mealybug is among the most destructive. First reported in Coimbatore in 2008 by researchers from the U.S.’s Integrated Pest Management Collaborative Research Support Program, the bug spread all over the country quickly. In papayas, it caused a white cottony coating on the fruit and killed papaya trees. But it also survived on over 80 other plants, including mulberry, tapioca, hibiscus and several fruits. “You name the crop, and the mealybug was attacking it,” says Shylesha.
•Within two years, the pest spread to over 50 hectares of mulberry in Tamil Nadu, the crop on which silkworms feed. According to one report, the Tamil Nadu silk industry saw cocoon productivity drop by over 60%. At first, farmers turned to chemical insecticides to control the pest. But the insect had a thick, waxy coating on its body, which resisted sprays. Worse, the insecticides were killing the handful of natural enemies the pest had in India, such as ladybird beetles.
•Stung by the attack, the Central Silk Board began exploring the idea of classical biological control, which would require importing natural predators of the species from its native country. In this case, the country was Mexico. Eventually, together with the NBAIR, they imported three parasitoids, or insects whose larvae kill the mealybug. After experiments to test whether these parasitoids attacked other beneficial species in India, such as the mulberry silk worm and honeybees, researchers chose one of the three: a wasp called Acerophagus papayae.
•Today, says Shylesha, the mealybug is mostly under control. But it did cause damage worth ₹1,500 crore every year to farmers during the early days. “And this doesn’t include the damage to the environment due to pesticide sprays.” There were things the Directorate of Plant Protection, Quarantine and Storage could have done to prevent the pest from spreading to other States after initial reports, such as imposing restrictions on the movement of plant material from Tamil Nadu. But such a “domestic quarantine” wasn’t imposed, he says.
•In August this year, the directorate issued an advisory to the agricultural departments of the States affected by the fall armyworm. It called for extensive surveys to track the pest’s spread. It also named a parasitoid that could be released to kill the eggs of the caterpillar. Further, it also suggested pesticidesagainst the armyworm, such as Lambda cyhalothrin, but cautioned that they shouldn’t be used simultaneously with the parasitoid.
•But it is already too late for some farmers. One of them is S. Raghavendra, a 35-year-old, whose extended family owns the fields in Chikkaballapur that Shylesha and his team have been surveying. Very few maize stalks in the field are armyworm-free today.
•When the caterpillar first showed up, Raghavendra visited an insecticide store and the shopkeeper suggested a few pesticides. “But every time I sprayed them, the pest would come back in a week,” Raghavendra said. Now, he fears that he might lose most of his income from his five acre maize farm. I ask him if he knows whether the caterpillar in his fields is a foreign visitor, never seen before in India.
📰 ‘Fat’ traces confirm ocean fossils were earliest animals
Dickinsonia had oval-shaped bodies and came in a variety of sizes
•A strange fossil that looks a bit like a giant leaf, or a fingerprint the size of a coffee table, has intrigued scientists for decades.
•Thousands of the fossils have been found over the past seven decades, revealing that it lived at the bottom of the ocean, without a mouth, intestines or anus, half a billion years ago.
•Was it a mossy plant? A giant single-celled amoeba? A failed experiment of evolution? Or the earliest animal on the earth?
•After digging one of these fossils off a cliff in Russia and analysing its contents, researchers discovered molecules of cholesterol, a type of fat. This confirms that the creature, known as Dickinsonia , is the earth’s earliest known animal, said a report in the journal Science .
•“Scientists have been fighting for more than 75 years” over the nature of these “bizarre fossils,” said associate professor Jochen Brocks from the Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences.
•“The fossil fat now confirms Dickinsonia as the oldest known animal fossil, solving a decades-old mystery that has been the Holy Grail of palaeontology.”
•Dickinsonia contained rib-like segments the length of its oval-shaped body, which came in a variety of sizes and could grow as large as 4.6 feet. The analysis showed the animals were abundant 558 million years ago, millions of years earlier than previously thought, according to Mr. Brocks.
•The creature was part of the Ediacara Biota that lived on the earth during a time when bacteria reigned, 542-635 million years ago.
Edicarian Period
•The Edicarian Period was about 20 million years prior to emergence of modern animal life — a period known as the Cambrian explosion.
•“The question has been, is that real? Is that an event that happened in earth history? Or have we just not found the older fossils?” asked David Gold, geobiologist and assistant professor at the University of California.
•“This paper is another really good line of evidence to support the idea that it is in fact an animal, and that animals are much older than the Cambrian.”
•Dickinsonia could be an ancestor of “many forms of animal life today” including worms and insects, added Mr. Gold, who was not part of the current study.
•Scientists had a difficult time finding Dickinsonia fossils with organic matter still attached. Many of the known fossils were in Australia, and had been exposed to too many elements over many millions of years.
•The fossil for the current study came from cliffs near the White Sea in the northwest of Russia. “I took a helicopter to reach this very remote part of the world — home to bears and mosquitoes — where I could find Dickinsonia fossils with organic matter still intact,” said Ilya Bobrovskiy, a doctoral researcher at ANU.
•“These fossils were located in the middle of cliffs of the White Sea that are 60 to 100 metres high. I had to hang over the edge of a cliff on ropes and dig out huge blocks of sandstone, throw them down, wash the sandstone and repeat this process until I found the fossils I was after.”
•Other researchers have previously claimed to have solved the mystery of the oddball animal. In September 2017, British researchers said they were certain it was an animal, based on a study of multiple fossils.
•Another team of researchers, including Mr. Gold, also concluded in 2015 that it was a relatively advanced type of animal because of the way its body grew differently than plants or mushrooms.
Advanced tools
•While the matter wasn’t entirely settled, palaeobiologist Doug Erwin said: “I think the consensus among the majority of people who have worked on these fossils for the last decade or so has been they’re somehow related to animals... This is a new line of evidence which is certainly welcome,” Mr. Erwin sad. In that sense, the report represents the first time that biomarkers have been used to determine that a fossil from the Edicarian Period is an animal instead of something else.
•“It’s part of a renaissance in the field in paleontology,” said Mr. Gold. “We’re discovering, as our tools and technologies get better and better, we’re finding that actually there are all sorts of organic matter — proteins, fats, different carbon compounds — things that we didn’t think could survive for such a long period of time,” he added.
