Due to the unusually heavy flooding this summer and the growing use of pesticides that are killing off natural predators to rodents, mice have overwhelmed farmers in Lujiao, in Hunan Province.
From Bloomberg:
China is building a new Great Wall — a relative miniature at 1 meter (3.3 feet) high — to guard against hordes of pillaging mice.About 2 billion mice nesting on the shores of China’s second-largest freshwater lake gnawed their way through 520,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) of crop land when rising water drove them from their burrows. Such plagues underline China’s growing struggle to maintain a stable environment, said Yang Hualin, director of the Chinese Pest Control Association in Beijing. [Full Text]
See also the illustrated China Daily article on the rodent plague and CDT’s coverage of the flooding that pushed the rodents inland.
[Image: Rat bones on the banks of Dongting Lake, from Bloomberg.]
