China’s northeast cornbelt likely to be hit by fall armyworm in 2020: government report (Reuters)
China warned earlier this week that a destructive pest that has threatened the country’s grain output is expected to hit more crops across wider areas in 2020, including the key corn-growing region in the northeast.
Fall armyworm, first detected in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan in January this year, is expected to spread to the corn belt in the northeast next year, a government institute said in a report on Monday, citing the pest’s reproduction patterns and high mobility.
“It is expected that in 2020, fall armyworm will be very severe and the situation will be extremely grave,” according to the report by the National Agriculture Technology Extension Service Center(NATESC), an institute under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
