Hungry Insects to Eat up More Than 40% Staple Crops of the World

Global warming, as we all know is not at all good for our planet. Now there is more reason to believe so. According to researchers, global warming is soon going to produce more hungry bugs. The rising temperatures are going to stimulate insect appetites and it will be prone to reproduce quickly, thereby bringing danger to human life as the hungry insects are going to finish main staple crops like wheat, corn, and rice, which feed billions of people every day across the world.

This situation may lead to a scarcity of food, leading to the rise of food insecurity and conflict, particularly in the poor countries, as these are the main crops which supplement more than 42 percent of calories, people eat every day.

According to Scott Merrill, Co-author of the study in the journal Science and a researcher associated with the University of Vermont, “When it gets warmer, pest metabolism increases. And when pest metabolism increases, insect pests eat more food, which is not good for crops”.

In earlier studies, the researchers had warned about the effects of the climate change on food staples, by making water scarce for irrigation or sapping nutritious content from the cereal grains. But in the recent study, the focus is on the increase of appetites for pests like aphids and borers.

At present Europe is the most productive wheat producing region in the world, but its annual losses could reach 16 million tons because of these pests. Eleven European countries are going to see 75 percent or higher losses in wheat from these pests as per the research.

The United States is the world’s largest producer of maize. Insect affected maize losses are going to rise up to 40 percent under current global warming trends, which also means loss of tonnes of maize every year.

China, which produces the one-third of the world’s rice, is going to lose 27 million tons of rice every year.

The insects are dangerous, if we consider the case of a particularly dangerous pest, known as the Russian wheat aphid. Though looks very tiny, these bugs are a major threat to North America, where it is considered an invasive species after first being detected in the 1980s.

Merrill said, the females aphid, are reproducing clonally, “These insects are born alive. They are born pregnant. Not only that, their granddaughters is developing inside them when they are born. It is crazy. They can reproduce under ideal temperatures very quickly. You can imagine how quickly a very small population, even one aphid, can just explode over a whole field season. One or two aphids could turn into a trillion under ideal conditions. It is insane how quickly these populations could grow”.

Till now, most of the research on crop effects from global warming is focused on the plants themselves. But researchers now believe these findings will now spark a hunt for more new solutions, like selecting heat and pest resistant crops and rotational planting rather than simply spraying more pesticides on the crops.