[ACCI-CAVIE] In Burkina Faso, the cotton sector, like several of its neighbors, is facing major pest attacks. Faced with this threat to the harvest, public interventions are trying to keep up.

In Burkina Faso, the government declared the Indian cotton jassid (Amrasca biguttula) an “agricultural plague” on Wednesday, February 8,2023 in the Council of Ministers. The new species, which is more harmful than the most common species of jassid (Jacobiella facialis) that strikes other countries in the sub-region, has caused severe attacks in cotton fields and has resisted the various interventions implemented by the sector’s stakeholders.

“These attacks lead to the slowing down or even the stopping of photosynthetic activity, which causes a drop in the productivity of the cotton plant,” says a press release. According to the executive, the new decree now allows the import and use of unregistered pesticides instead of insecticides used in the field until now, to “effectively fight against these high infestations of jassids”.

If the names of the phytosanitary products have not been disclosed, it should be noted that the government had announced in mid-January, an exemption for the use of three products (GRACIA 10 EC, JACOBIA and Flonicamide 050 WG) during the 2023/2024 campaign.

As a reminder, the poor state of the productive apparatus has led the authorities to reduce by 7% to 482,585 tons, the crop forecast for the 2022/2023 campaign. “More than 130 ha of fields have been affected and about 130,000 tons of seed cotton have been practically lost. This represents a loss of more than 65 billion CFA francs,” said Jean Pierre Guinko, representative of the Secretary General of the Ministry of Industrial Development, Trade, Handicrafts and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises.

By AE and LB