AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Australia is one of the world's top grain producers and exporters. And for months, its farmers, like many elsewhere in the world, have been struggling with fuel and fertilizer shortages due to the Iran war. Now a severe mouse plague in one of the country's main grain-growing regions is threatening to devastate crops and hurt exports, possibly in the billions of dollars. Kristina Kukolja reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICE SQUEAKING)
KRISTINA KUKOLJA, BYLINE: The sound of mice scurrying in all directions in videos shared online from farms overrun by the rodents, their numbers shocking even the local residents.
(SCREAMING)
KUKOLJA: Hundreds of thousands of acres across the vast wheat belt state of Western Australia are being invaded.
MARK FOWLER: Mice infesting houses, outbuildings, grain storage.
KUKOLJA: That's Mark Fowler, who grows barley, oats and canola on land south of Perth in an area affected by the infestation. He says, in the hardest hit regions, swathes of new crops are being destroyed by mice.
FOWLER: It's amazing the way they can locate grain under the ground, dig a burrow, eat the grain, move onto the next seed and completely strip rows of the seeds that would otherwise grow into the crop. They also, around their burrows, they'll feed on the new seedlings.
KUKOLJA: Fowler, who's from the industry body WAFarmers, says there's a lot of anxiety in the farming community, already under pressure from shortages and surging prices because of the Middle East war cutting off the flow of goods through the vital Strait of Hormuz.
FOWLER: Obviously, we're confronted with quite difficult circumstances for farming at the moment, with fuel and fertilizer and some challenging seasonal conditions in places as well and really tight terms of trade.
KUKOLJA: The mouse problem must be resolved urgently, according to Steve Henry, an expert on mice at the national agency the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. He says, with outbreaks in the neighboring state of South Australia, the plague could still spread.
STEVE HENRY: You get these isolated patches of mice. And then when conditions are favorable, they'll breed up and breed up and breed up. And because they have to move further to get their food, all of these isolated patches build up. And those numbers get higher and higher and higher until, effectively, you get chaos like we're seeing now.
KUKOLJA: Henry says the situation in Western Australia is even worse than the mouse plague that hit the eastern state of New South Wales five years ago, when an estimated $700 million in crops and seed was lost.
HENRY: It is about as bad as you could ever expect to see from mice.
KUKOLJA: This time, around grain industry estimates put potential losses in the billions of dollars, including in exports to Southeast Asia, a major market for Australian grain growers. In a race against time, farmers are now applying to the national pesticides regulator for emergency permits to use stronger poison on the mice. The Australian government is worried about the impact on food supply. Mark Fowler fears the damage to the season could be extensive.
FOWLER: We don't know yet to what extent that it'll have an impact on yield, but it's very significant. And it's stressful to watch, in difficult conditions, especially in this economic climate, areas of crop just getting bared out with nothing growing there.
KUKOLJA: The farmers, he says, are desperate.
For NPR News, I'm Kristina Kukolja in Melbourne.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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