• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1002 0

unrelenting. The same maggot can travel from plant to plant in fields of corn, barley, oats or rye. Stems punctured and roots consumed by the bulimia of millions of larvae, cereal crops are destroyed on a vast scale before producing a single grain. Rice, which makes up 60 percent of the grain used as food for the world’s population, is a prime target for these plunderers. Rice whorl maggots with their cylindrical bodies, pink semiloopers, biting spring beetles, grayish-colored, legless tipula, the armyworm caterpillar, June bug larvae, leafhoppers, millipedes, threadworms—over a hundred species attack this single cereal grain. Among the most devastating is a moth called “pyralid,” meaning literally “insect living in fire,” whose long, grayish caterpillars dig tunnels in the stalks of rice until they topple over. No less destructive are certain vicious little creatures armed with sucking stylets and protected from predators by thick carapaces. As for weevils, they have probably gobbled up more rice, corn and potatoes than humankind has managed to consume since agriculture first began.

For thousands of years, man has been conducting a desperate war against the authors of this destruction. Texts from ancient China, Rome and medieval Europe, all abound in extraordinary accounts of such battles. Lacking any effective means to ward off attack, our ancestors relied on magical and religious practices. Nepalese peasants posted notices in their paddy fields prohibiting insects from entry “on pain of legal proceedings.” Less naive but just as unrealistic, Roman peasants had pregnant women walk in circles around their fruit trees. Medieval Christians organized processions and novenas to counteract the cochylis and the corn and vine pyralids. Farmers in Venezuela beat the ears of their grain with belts in the hope that such rough treatment would strengthen their plants’ resistance to parasites. While Siamese farmers dotted their fields with eggshells pinned to sticks, those in Malaysia attached dead toads to bamboo poles to drive the white fly from their rice fields. Believing insect attacks to be the necessary consequence of sin in a divine and perfect creation, people took them to court. In 1120 in the Swiss city of Lausanne, caterpillars were excommunicated. Five centuries later a court in the French province of Auvergne condemned other caterpillars to go and “finish their wretched lives” in a place expressly provided for the purpose. Insects were brought to trial in Europe until 1830.

Fortunately, other more realistic countermeasures had been tried. By flooding their fields at certain times of the year, peasants in the south of India had managed to drown millions of destructive insects. In Kenya and Mexico the simple idea of planting squares of maize as lures in the middle of other crops had saved vegetable and sorghum plantations. Elsewhere the use of predatory insects had won some splendid victories. Texts dating from the third century A.D. report that Chinese growers infested their lemon trees with ants, which ate Vanessas, the richly colored butterflies that sowed terror in their orchards. Fifteen centuries later, the mandibles of a killer scarabaeid beetle saved the citrus plantations of California from the ravages of the Australian fly.

At the end of the nineteenth century, vegetable-based materials such as nicotine or the pyrethrum flower, and mineral substances such as arsenic and copper sulfate, supplied peasants with new weapons, which they called by the magic names of “insecticides,” and “pesticides.” With the discovery in 1868 that spraying the arsenic-based dye Paris green on cotton parasites had a guaranteed effect, the United States launched a frenzied campaign to commercialize natural poisons. By 1910, the new American pesticide industry was worth more than $20 million. Lead-arsenate-based products were then added to Paris green. The first world war brought about explosive expansion in other directions. With German submarines preventing the importing of Paris green and the war effort commandeering arsenic for the