Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh has spent the last decade trying to figure out how the plants feeding millions across Niger can better withstand the unpredictability of a warming planet. Extreme heat waves and severe droughts that alternate with heavy rainfall and flash floods are imperiling the many millet, rice, and sorghum farms throughout the Sahel region, where temperatures have risen much faster than the global average.
Yet the biggest threat to those farms is neither heat, droughts, nor floods, but the infestations unleashed with their arrival. The millet head miner is one of the most notorious of these hordes. The destructive moth lays eggs directly onto the flowering heads of the pearl millet crop, which hatch into larvae that feed voraciously from within the plant’s florets. Drought, sandy soils, and certain farming practices, such as sowing fields too early, only worsen infestations.
“In a bad year, it can wipe out a large part of a family harvest,” said Boubacar Gaoh. Domestic agriculture... Read more
