Tamale, Sept. 15, GNA - Cotton farmers in the Northern Region are watching helplessly as their crop waste away because a highly rated pesticide used for spraying their fields turned out to have expired in 2005 and is ineffective against ravaging seed cotton pests. Several hectares of cotton fields in the Tolon/Kumbungu and Savelugu/Nanton districts are slowly being lost to large population of bollworms, aphids and white flies that are eating freely into cotton bolls and deflowering young plants.

Cotton farmers who talked to the GNA said the pesticide Polytrin C was delivered by the Ghana Cotton Company Limited (GCCL). Cotton farmers said crop scientists (entomologists and plant breeders) at the Savannah Agricultural Research Institute at Nyankpala near Tamale have confirmed that the pesticide has expired and is ineffective.

It is unclear who marketed the expired pesticide to the GCCL but samples shown to the GNA indicated that the chemical was manufactured in Cote d'Ivoire by Syngenta Cote d'Ivoire S.A. and distributed by Wienco (GH) Limited.

The pesticide containers have paper stickers bearing March 2008 as the expiry date but underneath the stickers are inkjet embossments on the plastic containers bearing the expiry date of June 2005. Many cotton farmers, especially the younger ones like Munkaila Amadu, owner of a two-hectare cotton farm near Yabzeru in the Tolon/Kumbungu District, told the GNA that they are so disillusioned about the fate of their crop that they have threatened to quit farming and blamed GCCL zonal officers for their plight.

SARI sources told the GNA that for full effect against pests cotton growers are advised to apply a combination of two pesticides, Endonsulfan, which is sprayed at the earliest sign of pest visitation. Polytrin C, which entomologists at SARI describe as one of the most efficacious cotton pesticides on the market, is then sprayed on the crop at two-week intervals.

The farmers said although they noticed the impotency of Polytrin C early enough to avert the destruction of their crop, zonal officers supervising the spraying exercise insisted that the pesticide "is good and is working" and they continued spraying until September when they were asked to "double the dosage."

"We don't know who will pay the extra cost for using more of this medicine (Polytrin C) but our problem is that even after increasing the medicine, it is doing nothing to the worms (bollworms)." "The chemical has started to burn (scorch) the leaves of my crop", said Ibrahim Alhassan , a 27-year-old owner of a two-hectare farm besieged by bollworms in the Tolon area.

Entomologists at SARI described bollworms as "the most troubling of seed cotton pests" because if left uncontrolled, "the worms are capable of reducing total farm yield by half or a third". They said the worms usually laid their eggs on young cotton leaves and when they hatched, the larvae would migrate into the flower where they would eat indiscriminately into the boll, causing both flower and boll to drop off the plant.

The scientists said the average pest-controlled field should yield between 2,500 and 3,000 kilogrammes of seed cotton per hectare. They expressed fear, however, that if the high population of pests in the region was not checked, yield per hectare could slump to no more than 1,000 kilogrammes per hectare and this could discourage farmers from venturing into the cotton sector.

They suggested that to forestall a recurrence of "this unfortunate development" next farming season, GCCL must present all inputs meant for cotton fields to SARI well in advance for analysis and clearance before they are applied on farms. 15 Sept 07