A senior agricultural official has expressed a desire to convert a county on the Chinese border with Laos and Vietnam into a strategic base for fighting significant cross-border crop pests and diseases in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus on combating the fall armyworm.

Dubbed a "global challenge" by plant scientists, the fall armyworm is a highly destructive pest that primarily targets corn. It entered China's Yunnan province from Myanmar toward the end of 2018 and swiftly spread to various provinces, posing a serious threat to agricultural production.

The initiative to establish the base was announced at an event organized by the Institute of Plant Protection of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Yunnan's Jiangcheng Hani and Yi autonomous county, which borders both Laos and Vietnam to the south.

Addressing a diverse audience consisting of agricultural scientists, government officials and United Nations representatives, Yang Zhenhai, Party chief of the academy, stressed the critical importance of transforming the county into a strong and resilient bastion to halt the cross-border spread of plant diseases and pests in Southeast Asia, a global food-producing hub.

"Efforts will also be made to promote green technologies and innovative methods of pest control to be used in more member nations of the Belt and Road Initiative," he said.

Jiangcheng was designated as an experimental station for the Beijing-based Institute of Plant Protection following the fall armyworm's invasion of China in late 2018.

The county has since played a crucial role in controlling the spread of the pest across borders.

Originating from the Americas, the fall armyworm has rapidly spread across Africa, Asia and the South Pacific islands within just five years since its first reported invasion of Nigeria in 2016, posing a severe threat to global food security.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that plant diseases cost the global economy around $220 billion each year, with 20 to 40 percent of crop production lost to pests.

Since the fall armyworm's detection in China six years ago, Chinese plant scientists have successfully identified the seasonal migration patterns of the pest in the border regions between China and Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.

Leveraging information technology and computer vision technology, scientists at the Institute of Plant Protection have created systems for automatic identification, dynamic monitoring and precise early detection of these pests.

Through effective management strategies, China has reduced the annual average occurrence area of the pest by about 5.33 million hectares. This has helped avoid an annual loss of 5 to 6 million metric tons of corn, according to an estimate by the institute.

China's success in managing the fall armyworm has been recognized globally.

The Institute of Plant Protection was honored with the FAO Achievement Award during a ceremony in Rome commemorating the 44th World Food Day on Oct 16 for its pioneering efforts in combating the invasive species.

The award is bestowed biennially to acknowledge exceptional technical cooperation or humanitarian work in sustainable agriculture, rural development or food security at the national level.

FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu presented the prestigious award to the institute, emphasizing that its work has made a significant impact in China, Asia and worldwide by advancing crop protection and food security.

China's control of the fall armyworm has not only safeguarded the country's grain output but has also mitigated the risk of the pest spreading to neighboring Southeast Asian countries, experts say.

During a symposium in Beijing in October last year, Wu Kongming, president of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, highlighted the Chinese government's commitment to managing the fall armyworm invasion, which he described as a global challenge.

"Years of State-led control efforts have yielded preliminary success," he said.