ENVIRONMENT: France Confronts an Italian Invasion

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Sep 1 2006 (IPS) - Burgundy no longer means wines and colours to French farmers these days. It is now a region being devastated by the locust Calliptamus Italicus.

The origins of the locust are associated with Italy, but it has made France its home in the summers now, and this year more than before.

“This summer the Italian locusts have attacked everything that is green in Burgundy, and also flowers, cornfields, and even nettles,” Bernard Lacour, director of the regional federation of farmers told IPS.

Jean-Claude Richard, director of the Burgundy agency for the protection of vegetables said farmers are seeing a “spectacular proliferation of Calliptamus Italicus in several Burgundy areas, with massive destruction of gardens, grasslands and fields.”

Environmentalists say global warming is behind the movement of the locust north to France from Italy and further south.

The Italian crickets have moved to Burgundy “due to the extreme hot, dry summers and the cold, long winters we have experienced in recent years,” Monique Prost, entomologist at the Scientific Museum of Dijon in the heart of Burgundy told IPS. “This year the temperatures were warmer than normal already in the spring, and the locusts’ larva could develop well.”

The weather “reduced the larva’s normal mortality, leading to a demographic explosion of the insects,” she said.

Jean-François Duranton, expert on locusts at the Montpellier-based International Research Centre for Agronomy and Development, confirms Prost’s analysis. “Such plagues are good indicators of the ecological disequilibria caused by global warming. I fear that we will observe more such proliferations in the future due to the hotter, dryer weather.”

Duranton sees a threefold danger represented by the proliferation of the locusts and their migration to new habitats.

“On the one hand, such plagues are rising all over the world. On the other, experts on locusts and crickets are themselves an endangered species. And, finally, ecological research on matters related to such phenomena is not at the top of the international agenda.”

Duranton said desert locust plagues hit many countries in 1998-1999 and again in 2004 from Mauritania, Morocco and Senegal in Western Africa to Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the East. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation says the plagues destroyed crops worth an estimated 3 billion dollars.

French farmers are now confronting the Italian locust, and many other unnatural changes besides. In Brittany region on the Atlantic coast the local seaweed goémon (Fucus Ascophyllum) is disappearing. The plant is considered vital for the marine ecology of the region.

“The rocks on the seashores, where the seaweed used to thrive abundantly, are now completely bald,” Auguste Le Roux, retired researcher from the biological and marine research station on Bailleron Island in the Gulf of Morbihan told IPS.

Local biologist Sylvain Chauvaud has used satellite images to show how the seaweed is vanishing. “The goémon has disappeared up to 65 percent at several places,” he told IPS.

Patrick Le Mao, marine biologist at the French Marine Research Institute (IFRIMER) says warming is behind this change too. “Sea waters are now warmer than a couple of years ago, killing seaweeds such as Fucus Ascophyllum,” he said.

Warmer seawater is also stimulating the growth of other flora, especially algae, leading to a reduction of light that is essential for the survival of goémon. “Also, some molluscs which eat the weed grow now more than before, leading to massive consumption and ultimately to its disappearance,” Le Mao said.

The disappearance of the goémon represents a danger for local marine biodiversity because the seaweed is at the heart of a complex foodstuff chain involving numerous species, Le Mao said.

“So even if it is difficult to establish a clear link between one phenomenon and another, there is a long chain of changes affecting the local environment in Brittany.”

Worrying changes are being noted also in French forests. The hot weather over the recent years has brought decay in trees such as poplars, oaks, and beeches, according to the forestry department at the French ministry of Agriculture.

Jean-Luc Dupouey, director of the Laboratory for Ecology and Forest Physiology at the French National Agronomical Research Institute, says trees can adapt to climate changes but only up to a degree.

“During drought, trees can regulate their consumption of water, either by closing their stomas to reduce exchanges with their environment, or by prematurely losing leaves,” Dupouey told IPS.

“Such adaptations allow the trees to endure hardships imposed by climate and prolong their lives.” But trees cannot withstand such hardships if they come too frequently, he said.

“If the droughts are repeated every year, trees wear out their carbon reserves, and in the long term they die because they continue to exhaust their own biological capital which is not renewed every year.”

In addition, such adaptation to a changing environment has a long-term global effect. “By closing their stomas the trees reduce their consumption of carbon, thus reducing their sequestration of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide,” Dupouey said.

The ministry of agriculture says French forests have reduced their capture of greenhouse gases by up to 30 percent over recent years.