Buner & Swat: Plague round the corner?

Rats become sexually vigorous when they are five weeks old. They produce litters of five to ten pups, and breed every two months for three years continually on the average.  What holds down the explosive population growth is limitation of food. A sudden increase in food supply will cause a burgeoning of rat population, and when the population is particularly dense, plague cases become epizootic.

In Mizoram, in the north-east region of the Indian subcontinent, bamboo flowers once in fifty years and the seeds are manna for the rats. The Mizos dread the flowering of the bamboo as the rat hordes, after the depleting the bamboo seeds and flowers, turn their attention to crops. The rats also usher in the plague which is enzootic.   

In Buner and Swat, in the north-west region of the subcontinent, a man made catastrophe is in the making. A window of ten to twenty days presents itself for wheat harvesting. In April, just before the window for harvesting was about to open, the Pakistani army launched a military campaign in Buner and Swat to eliminate the Taliban. Heavy artillery fire and aerial bombing was resorted to which flushed out the Taliban and the local population (more than two million) in opposite directions. The wheat crop was left to rot. I am not aware of any earlier cases of human conflict where thousands of acres of wheat fields were left un-harvested and left to rot.     

Rats in wheat fields dig burrows and store wheat panicles for later consumption. As the wheat crop ripens, the rats concentrate on devouring and hoarding wheat grains more than other vegetation. In the case of Buner and Swat, the wheat fields have been entirely left to the rodents. While this article is being written(15 July, 2009) the rats (already increased in number) must be scurrying around the rotting wheat plants, salvaging whatever they can for future use. 

The rains are due any moment and the fields should have been readied for sowing the next wheat crop. However, the IDPs are only now trickling in with many still apprehensive about the security arrangements. It looks as though there will be no sowing of wheat in Buner and Swat this season. Once the rats consume the hoarded wheat over the next two or months, while multiplying at an exponential rate, will suddenly find their burrowed granaries empty.

They will invade towns like Mingora. In the North East, the rat hordes not only devastated the rice field of Mizoram, but crossed the border into Bangla Desh. Will the rats of Swat and Buner swarm like locusts into neighboring districts like Swabi, Shangla and Dir and eventually to Islamabad and Peshawar?

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