UN experts say China unlikely to suffer major infestation because Himalaya mountains act as ‘natural barrier’ for locusts in India and Pakistan

China has heightened prevention and control measures to protect its cropland from desert locusts that have ravaged India and Pakistan, despite assurances that the likelihood of a large-scale attack was marginal.
Locusts, which decimate almost all green vegetation including crops and trees, have swarmed swathes of agricultural land on the India-Pakistan border, an area identified as a global hotspot for the pests by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
The outbreak has raised concerns in neighbouring China, where an economic downturn is already being made worse by the spread of a new coronavirus that has killed more than 2,200 people and ground business to a near halt.
However, officials at the FAO have played down the threat, saying a huge plague of locusts was unlikely.
“There is no threat to China by the desert locust because of a) the wind direction and b) they cannot cross the Himalaya Mountains because they are too tall and the air is too cold – so this is a natural barrier,” said FAO’s senior locust forecasting officer Keith Cressman by email.
China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs agreed the threat was small, but officials are not leaving anything involving national food security to chance.
China’s agriculture sector had a devastating year in 2019, hit by the crop-gobbling fall armyworms, which spread over a million hectares of farmland, as well as African swine fever that has killed about half of the country’s 440 million pigs through culling of disease.