Kenya: Highly invasive apple snail pest cuts farmers’ yield by 14 percent and income by 60 percent

Apple snail, a highly invasive pest which was first reported in 2020 in Kenya at Mwea Irrigation Settlement Scheme (MIS) has increasingly become a matter of concern cutting farmers’ yields by 14 per cent and yields by 60 per cent. Since its discovery, it has proliferated across more than 90 percent of MIS and neighboring rice out-grower farms. This expansion has been enabled by farmers sharing of farming equipment, water distribution channels, and flooding practices. According to the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI), an adult apple snail can destroy a square meter of rice in one night. The arrival of apple snail in MIS, a major rice growing area in Kenya, is of immense concern. The history of apple snail invasion in Asian agricultural systems demonstrates the snail’s huge impacts where these systems have been rapidly overwhelmed. In addition to the damage done to agriculture, the snail could also push already fragile ecosystems into irreversible decline ...