Cairo, Egypt - The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation have signed an agreement to start the rapid response project to strengthen national capacities in the Arab Republic of Egypt to use, monitor and manage the early warning system of the Fall Armyworm.

The agreement was signed by His Excellency Dr. Ezzeldine Abu Steit, Minister of Agriculture and Land Reclamation, and Mr. AbdulSalam Ould Ahmed, Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative of FAO in the Near East and North Africa region, at the Headquarters of the Ministry of Agriculture, in the presence of a number of officials from both ends.

The project aims to protect the livelihoods and food security of smallholder farmers, including women and youth in areas affected by the Fall Armyworm, and to develop the capacities of key stakeholders in the area of awareness, control, supervision and integrated worm management. It also aims to minimizing the worm's impact by controlling the worm’s outbreaks via enhancing capacities in terms of its monitoring and integrated management at all levels.

In this regard, Mr. Ould Ahmed said: “Such a large-scale invasive pest has the potential to significantly affect Egypt's food security situation by causing damage to many crops such as maize, rice, sorghum, sugar cane and cotton that are of high economic importance to Egypt". 

During 2019, FAO provided a number of training courses to eight governorates in southern Egypt, including Aswan, Luxor, Quena, Assuit, Sohag, Minya, Beni Sueif and Fayoum, where FAO’s Regional Office, in cooperation with the Country Office, provided technical support by transferring the expertise of the countries that faced this scourge as well as provided materials for pest screening from phermone traps and mobile devices to facilitate the use of appropriate applications to obtain accurate information.

The program focused on providing all the information on the Fall Armyworm, its behavior, its damage and the symptoms of its infection, the formulation of a future vision in terms of procedures for preventing its entry and spread in Egypt, and the efforts made by FAO in addressing this worm, the FAO-approved programme to monitor and confront the pest if it enters, in addition to the efforts of the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation in facing this scourge, in addition to field training on how to identify and detect the scourge and its symptoms and to distribute and manage the pheromone traps.

In May 2019, the first report was submitted about the Fall Armyworm in Egypt, where the presence of the worm in the corn fields of Aswan, Luxor and Quena governorates was announced,. The official identification of the pest was based on three moth samples collected from corn fields in Aswan governorate.

The total area of maize cultivation in Egypt reached 601,920 hectares in 2017, while production reached 7.1 million tons. This will have a short- and long-term impact on agricultural production, food security and the feed industry, and therefore affects millions of livelihoods from various value chain operators on various commodities in the country.