Fall armyworm control efforts safeguard China's grain output, protect neighbors

China's sweeping efforts to control fall armyworm, a destructive pest that affects a wide range of crops but mainly infests corn, have helped secure the country's grain output and reduced the risk of the pest spreading to neighboring Southeast Asian countries, an official said on Tuesday.

Wu Kongming, president of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said the Chinese government had attached great importance to controlling fall armyworm, which originated in the Americas and was first discovered in China in December 2018.

"Four years of State-led control efforts have yielded preliminary success," he said at the FAO Global Symposium on Sustainable Fall Armyworm Management, which opened in Beijing on Tuesday.

The event was organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and CAAS. The UN agency initiated a Global Action for Fall Armyworm Control in 2020, with Chinese researchers, including a number from CAAS, having been active participants.

China had amassed experience in tackling the pest during the process, creating a new mechanism to curb them with integrated control techniques, Wu said.

He called fall armyworm a shared global challenge and said he intended to use the symposium to bolster exchanges of expertise and create a plan that would allow the world's food producers to control the pest in a concerted fashion.