Chinese villagers have found a new and effective way of dealing with pine moths, which causes serious damage to forests by collecting the moths' pupas and processing them into a delicacy.
Chi Mingfeng, manager of the forest owned by Hebei province, said that there has been no moth epidemic in recent years in the Huangtuliangzi forest farm, the second largest of its kind in the province.
At least one tenth of the 14,000 hectare forest farm used to be plagued by the pest; the Global Times quoted the manager as saying.
"When the epidemic was serious, large areas of trees became leafless just in a few days," he added.
A decade ago, Chi learned that the pupas could be eaten. Then, he sent some samples to a centre where meat quality is supervised and inspected in China. Tests of the samples showed the pupas to be a rich source of nutrition.
The farm soon set up a pupa processing works with a capacity of 50 tonnes each year. Villagers began to collect the pupas in the forest and sold them to the factory, which also proved to be a good income source.
"The pupas are found less and less in the surrounding area, so we now purchase them from Inner Mongolia and Liaoning," Chi said.
Currently, China has 12 million hectares of forests suffering the ravages of pests each year, causing direct economic losses of more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion), according to the state forestry administration.
