Crop Invaders: China’s Small Farmers Struggle to Defeat Armyworm

Yu Wuyang, an ethnic Dai farmer, picks corn in her cornfield at Nuodong village in Yunnan Province, China on July 13, 2019. Aly Song/Reuters

MENGHAI, China—Yan Wenliu leans on the side of his cart as he prepares to leave his sugarcane field in Southwest China, bewildered by the formidable new pest that has ambushed his crops this year.

“I don’t know what it is,” says Yan, a 36-year-old farmer from Menghai County in Yunnan Province. “But it is bigger than other ones. I have never seen this worm before.”