Samples collected to test for fall armyworm have returned positive, the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries confirmed this week. An official said authorities now had to deal with this threat to South Africa's food security. Department spokeswoman Bomikazi Molapo said the Agricultural Research Council's Plant Protection Research Institute had reported that fall armyworm was positively identified from samples collected in Limpopo. "The samples were jointly collected by scientists from the ARC Grain Institute and North-West University. These were caterpillars that had to pupate and emerge as moths before a positive identification could be done," she said. Fall armyworm has wreaked havoc in parts of Southern Africa and been positively identified in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Namibia. Zimbabwe's agriculture minister, Joseph Made, said that with good rain the country had managed to increase land under tillage, but the fall armyworm and lack of fertilisers were "the biggest...
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