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Note: This report is based on the most recent updates as of 1:53 p.m. PST, July 27. Please refer to local government and fire agency websites and social media for the most timely information regarding evacuations.
Brian BullUnderscore Native News
Firefighters, pilots and equipment operators are mobilized across much of Indian Country in Washington and Oregon, to rein in wildfires that have endangered many tribal communities.
In a statement issued Monday by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Tribal Chairman Dennis White III said, “I want to assure our Tribal membership that our highest priority is the safety and well-being of our Nation. We remain committed to protecting lives, property, and our lands. We will continue working closely with emergency responders, Incident Command, and or local, state, and federal partners as we navigate this crisis together.”
“I ask everyone to continue following evacuation orders, remain vigilant, and keep our firefighters, first responders, emergency personnel, and all those affected in your prayers. Together we will support one another as we move through this emergency.”
Colville Reservation and the Kaiser Canyon Fire
At 124,251 acres, the Kaiser Canyon Fire is the largest active fire in Washington. It started on July 16 after a lightning strike hit the Colville Reservation in the Nespelem Area. 884 personnel are on-site, with 15 percent of the fire contained.
“Crews will continue direct attack where possible and use indirect tactics when terrain or conditions are hazardous,” according to Inciweb’s latest summary on the fire. “Firefighting resources will be strategically reassigned to protect structures and at-risk assets along the northern and eastern fire perimeters, including the Kartar, Nespelem, Owhi Lake, and Keller areas.”
Gusts of up to 20 miles per hour in areas with lots of dry and dead brush have fueled the Kaiser Canyon fire’s growth, though winds are expected to ease on Wednesday.
Areas that are in Level 3 evacuation status “GO NOW” are:
- Along Highway 155 on both sides of the highway from Coyote Creek Campground to Haley Creek, continuing south to Hailey Creek Road, then South to Omak Lake Road to Columbia River Road and then South to Kartar Valley Road;
- the area of Kartar Road and Coyote Creek Road; the Jackson Ranch area, north to Mill Creek area, to Owhi Lake area, to Buffalo Lake Road, back to the Nespelem Agency, Owhi Lake area to Buffalo Lake Road back to the Nespelem Agency to Nespelem;
- and from South Nanamkin Road east to Hwy 21, Hwy 21 South to S Empire Creek Rd, East to the Ferry County Line, North to South Nanamkin Road.
For road closures:
- Kartar Road remains closed due to active fire danger; Buffalo Lake Road South from the Nespelem Agency is closed to Reynold Resort;
- State Route 155 is CLOSED from Monument south to Park City Loop Road;
- Cache Creek Road remains CLOSED from Nespelem to State Highway 21;
- SR 155 is closed to Park City Loop Road due to fire and dangerous trees in the area.
Travelers are advised to check PerimeterMap.com for the latest road closure information.
The Cedar Fund of the Colville Indian Reservationhas created a fund to help people and families affected by wildfires on the reservation.
Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Bench Fire
Over the weekend, the Beachcomb and Bench Fires on the Warm Springs reservation in north-central Oregon merged, and officials now call it the Bench Fire. At 40,296 acres, it remains completely uncontained. Inciwebsays there’s potential for “extreme fire behavior, wind driven runs and long-range spotting.”
As winds increased in velocity, officials confirmed on Monday morningthat the Bench Fire destroyed six homes and five outbuildings (agricultural and non-residential outhouses). As assessments of structural losses continue, they say the fire has created three potential fronts threatening the Warm Springs community.
On Sunday, fire crews finished a bulldozer and hand-dug line along the M-100 Road and completed another dozer line and controlled burn along Palmer Lane to help protect buildings. According to Inciweb Monday, 281 personnel are engaged in direct suppression work at Campbell and Willow Creeks, and “conduct point protection around Warm Springs and other threatened communities while securing areas,” where the Bench Fire crossed roads and the Deschutes River.
High temps will range between 89 and 94 degrees Fahrenheit Monday, with low humidity, with some gusts up to 15 miles per hour in the afternoon.
The Bench Fire began on July 23 and its cause remains under investigation.
“GO” evacuation notices remain in effect for the Warm Springs Agency District, including:
- All of Greeley Heights
- Tenino Apartments
- Trailer Courts
- West Hill
- Elmer Quinn Park
- The Campus Area
- And any residents along Shitike Creek.
“GO” evacuation notices also remain in place for:
- Pelton Park
- Pelton Dam
- Dry Hollow
- Lake Simtustus
Residents should follow local emergency notifications and evacuation instructions.
Travelers are encouraged to monitor roadway status and conditions, including US Highway 26, via the Oregon Department of Transportation’s TripCheck website.
Relief supply sites have been set up in the Portland and Gresham areas, at Oregon State Rep. Ricki Ruiz’ district office at 135 NW 1st Street, Suite 1 in Gresham (between 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. PST); Bison Coffee House, 3941 NE Cully Blvd. in Portland; and Parcera Vintage at 1428 NE Broadway, in Portland.
Desired donations include water and no-cook foods; blankets, basic medical supplies, pet supplies, childcare supplies, hotel donations and gift cards, fans, air filters, and personal hygiene kits. People are encouraged to text or call these sites to schedule dropoffs or pick-ups.
Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation – Hagen Fire
Last Wednesday, the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation’s Board of Trustees declared a state of emergency for the reservation until conditions improve. At 26,879 acres, the Hagen Fire continues to burn nine miles southwest of Tollgate. Inciweb reportedthat firefighters dropped 50,000 gallons of water Sunday to slow its spread. According to Inciweb, the north perimeter of the fire at Bingham Road is holding and with mopping up operations continuing. There is no containment yet, with the Hagen Fire expanding to the east and south, and some more moderate growth to the west.
The Oregon State Fire Marshal says there are four incident management teams, firefighters, and other resources working on “six conflagrations” or large fires in the area. This includes the Horse Ridge and Paradise Fires. Altogether there are 946 personnel committed to the area.
“These women and men are working around the clock to protect numerous communities threatened by wildfire,” stated the OSFM on their Instagram account.
Air quality is poor and a public health emergency also remains in effect. The Umatilla Tribes’ emergency management plan will have tribal officials meeting daily with the Oregon Department of Human Services, American Red Cross, and the emergency management and public health departments of Umatilla County.
An emergency shelter with clean air has been set up at Sunridge Middle School at 700 SW Runnion Avenue in Pendleton.
The latest on evacuation levels and other wildfire information can be found on the county website.
Yakama Nation, Signal Peak and White Swan Fires
As of 9:00 a.m. Monday, Yakima County Emergency Management has lowered evacuation levels back to Level 2 “Be Ready” near White Swan. A Level 3 “Leave Now!” notice was issued Sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m., after a new fire was spotted near Ransier and Wesley Roads.
As of 2:55 p.m. Monday, the White Swan (Ransier) Fire was estimated to be at 901 acres and 52 percent contained.
According to Watch Duty, another fire, Signal Peak, remains uncontained and has burned 3,074 acres. The fire started around 3:30 p.m. last Friday.
Heavy brush, grass, and timber have fueled the fires. Shelters have been established at the Yakama Nation Tribal School, the Harrah Elementary School, the Wapato First Baptist Church, and the Wapato and Toppenish longhouses. The causes for both fires remain under investigation.
“These fires have affected families, homes, cultural resources, and community facilities across the Yakima nation,” wrote Christopher Wallahee, Tribal Council Executive Secretary for the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. “We recognize the tremendous efforts of emergency personnel, volunteers, tribal programs, and community members who continue to support one another during this challenging time.”
Wallahee encouraged everyone to remain alert, follow evacuation guidance, monitor tribal emergency updates, and check on relatives, elders and neighbors who might need assistance.
“Our thoughts are with all those impacted by the signal peak fire and Ramseier fire. Together, our community remained strong, resilient, and committed to helping one another through recovery and rebuilding.”
The post Wildfires blaze through Pacific Northwest tribal lands appeared first on ICT.
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This story was originally published by Alaska Beacon.
Yereth Rosen
Alaska Beacon
Two weeks before construction could begin on a controversial road that would cut through Izembek National Wildlife Refuge wetlands, three Western Alaska tribal governments and several environmental groups have filed new lawsuits seeking to block the project.
Both complaints, filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, are seeking to overturn a key permit issued earlier this month by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a 19-mile road that would pass through what had previously been protected as designated wilderness within the refuge.
Plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits, filed Thursday, are the Native Village of Hooper Bay, the Native Village of Paimiut and the Chevak Native Village, tribal governments with Yup’ik members and the Center for Biological Diversity, whose attorneys are handling the lawsuit. Plaintiffs in the other lawsuit, filed Wednesday, are Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges, the Alaska Wilderness League, the National Wildlife Refuge Association, the Sierra Club and Wilderness Watch. The environmental groups are represented by Trustees for Alaska, an Anchorage-based environmental law firm.
Defendants in both cases are the Corps, and the tribal lawsuit also names the Alaska director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the Izembek refuge, and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as defendants.
Plaintiffs say the Corps’ wetlands-fill permit, issued to the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, is illegal because the federal agency failed to fully consider the impacts to the wetlands and wildlife.
the environmentalists’ lawsuit described the importance of the area that they said would be damaged by the road: “Izembek is one of the world’s most important migratory bird staging and wintering habitats, supporting millions of migratory waterfowl and shorebirds in its coastal lagoons and freshwater wetlands complex.”
The tribes’ lawsuit said harm from the road to the migrating geese that use the refuge, “including poor body condition, diminished reproductive success, and reduced survival rates” would have serious consequences for tribal residents who depend on those birds for their subsistence hunts and culture.
The Interior Department declined to comment on the lawsuits challenging the Corps permit, and the Corps did not respond to an emailed query.
A land trade necessary for the road construction, which swapped land owned by the King Cove Corp., an Alaska Native Village Corporation, for some designated wilderness land within the refuge, got the Trump administration’s final approval in October.
That land trade is also being challenged in federal court by the same plaintiffs, along with Defenders of Wildlife. Those lawsuits have been consolidated, and they remain pending. U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason has said she will issue a decision in that matter soon.
The Department of Transportation plans to start building the first section of the road, to stretch almost 3 miles, as early as Aug. 8, according to a notice filed in U.S. District Court by the Alaska Department of Law.
The road plan has been promoted for decades by residents of the isolated Aleut village of King Cove, which has about 750 residents, according to the city. It would connect the village to a military-quality airstrip at Cold Bay, a community of only about 50 people but previously the site of military operations that began in World War II. A legacy of those operations is the still-used Cold Bay airport, which features a runway over 10,000 feet in length.
To King Cove residents and their supporters, the road is a crucial link needed for emergency evacuations in a part of Alaska frequently beset by bad weather. King Cove’s tiny airport is frequently unusable, but the Cold Bay airport, which is only a few miles away, can handle big aircraft flying in bad weather, making access to it critical.
“The road is not just about transportation, it is a matter of human rights, Indigenous self-determination, and environmental justice,” said a statement issued by the Aleut Corp., the regional Native-owned corporation that includes King Cove. The statement followed completion of the land trade in October.
When the Corps permit was issued on July 10 to the Department of Transportation, Alaska political leaders celebrated, including with praise for President Donald Trump.
“This is a historic day for the people of King Cove and the people of Alaska,” Gov. Mike Dunleavy said in a statement issued that day. “I want to thank President Trump and his administration for putting the people of Alaska first and allowing this road to become a reality.”
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, used the occasion to bash former President Joe Biden.
“For Alaskans, the decades-long King Cove Road impasse has been a symbol of an uncaring, out-of-touch, faraway federal government that prioritizes the lives of birds over people,” Sullivan said in a statement released by the three-member Alaska congressional delegation. “The great residents of King Cove time and again have kept hope alive, despite setbacks, most recently when the Biden administration disregarded the voices of the community and withdrew the previously approved land exchange.”
The post Lawsuits seek to overturn permit for road construction through Alaska wildlife refuge appeared first on ICT.
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Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh has spent the last decade trying to figure out how the plants feeding millions across Niger can better withstand the unpredictability of a warming planet. Extreme heat waves and severe droughts that alternate with heavy rainfall and flash floods are imperiling the many millet, rice, and sorghum farms throughout the Sahel region, where temperatures have risen much faster than the global average.
Yet the biggest threat to those farms is neither heat, droughts, nor floods, but the infestations unleashed with their arrival. The millet head miner is one of the most notorious of these hordes. The destructive moth lays eggs directly onto the flowering heads of the pearl millet crop, which hatch into larvae that feed voraciously from within the plant’s florets. Drought, sandy soils, and certain farming practices, such as sowing fields too early, only worsen infestations.
“In a bad year, it can wipe out a large part of a family harvest,” said Boubacar Gaoh. Domestic agriculture, he noted, is both the West African nation’s economic backbone and the foundation of most families’ access to food. Roughly 2.4 million people throughout Niger face acute food insecurity and 1.6 million children suffer from acute malnutrition. “When you’re talking about a crop that feeds the household, that isn’t just lost income. It’s less food on the table,” he said.
Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh (center) and another researcher talk with a farmer in Konni, Niger, about the pest challenges he faces in his field.
Courtesy of Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh
Boubacar Gaoh’s grandparents were millet farmers, so as a plant breeder in Niamey specializing in staple crops, he’s personally invested in developing on-the-ground solutions to help protect growers from pests like the millet head miner. In November 2024, he launched a program that sought to equip local farmers with the tools they need for crop disease surveillance and pest control. In partnership with an agricultural research hub hosted by Pennsylvania State University, the work was funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future Innovation Labs program.
From the start, he and his team set out to visit farmers across Niger, offering hands-on training on how to fight pests and disease affecting their harvests, teaching them not only how to use free technologies like PlantVillage, an AI-powered mobile platform for pest and disease forecasting, but how to confront infestations. Solutions for containing infestations vary, but farmers first must spot the bugs behind them — a tricky feat, especially in the case of the millet head miner, which can do some real damage undetected. That’s where monitoring tools, said Boubacar Gaoh, can make all the difference. “Timing is everything. … It only strikes during a short window as the grain forms,” he said. “The real reduction in crop loss comes from acting on that warning at the right moment.”
Last January, they were preparing to roll out the use of natural predators to eradicate the millet head miner, along with a multitude of other agricultural menaces. They’d even just met with officials at Niger’s Ministry of Agriculture to negotiate use of their data to inform the government’s understanding of crop health and national surveillance systems.
Then, without warning, it was all over. On January 24, 2025, days after his inauguration, President Donald Trump issued a stop-work order that suspended nearly all of USAID’s overseas programs,\ before dismantling the agency entirely. In the months that followed, nearly all of the 17 core Innovation Labs, anchored in American universities with a network of international partners, received funding termination notices.
Boubacar Gaoh stayed on part time, drawing on a small stipend provided by a donor to the Penn State lab, but the rest of his team in Niger was let go. In the year and a half since, he has pivoted to chasing funding sources in an increasingly fraught and competitive philanthropic landscape. He’s had little luck.
“I was surprised when it was stopped — because, why? Everyone knows that with climate change, pests are moving around. The conditions are so that these pests can grow and develop in the region where previously they couldn’t develop and affect food supply,” said Boubacar Gaoh.
Boubacar Gaoh’s team conducted diagnostic visits all over Niger, including at a watermelon plot (left) and a vegetable farm (right). Then, without warning, it was all over. Courtesy of Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh
A statement by the White House on the funding cuts issued last fall, when it formally cancelled the $72 million funding the program, described USAID’s spending as “woke, weaponized, and wasteful.” By then, the administration had gutted all but one lab. The Climate-Resilient Cereals Innovation Lab at Kansas State University was given the go-ahead to continue its research. (The lab has since rebranded itself as the “Innovation Lab for Cereals.”) Because Congress appropriated the funds, questions surfaced on the legality of Trump’s power to withhold the funding, but then the Supreme Court ruled that the president had the discretion to do so.
“Why were all the other labs terminated?” Timothy Dalton, then-interim director of the Kansas lab, asked at the time. “When they’re doing such critically important work as we are doing, in order to combat global food insecurity and to generate scientific advances that can be harnessed by the U.S. agricultural community?” A university spokesperson for the cereals lab declined Grist’s request for an interview.
This March, the State Department issued a new call for proposals for Feed the Future Innovation Labs, inviting any U.S.-based university to submit a statement of interest in an open competition for the resurrected program. The call for applications described the labs as mechanisms “to advance global food security in alignment with U.S. policy through targeted research.” Approximately five to seven awards were anticipated, the listing noted, ranging from $20 million to $40 million. To the scientists watching their labs get dismantled a year earlier, the announcement raised an obvious question: resurrected for whom, and to do what?
Although the labs’ stated goals on hunger and food security haven’t changed much, where the work happens could look very different under the Trump administration’s redesigned version of the program. Former USAID officials and innovation lab directors told Grist that they are concerned that lower-income African regions, which had always been the focus of the program, have now been deprioritized in favor of countries in the Western Hemisphere.
“A 27-page document of criteria, and Africa gets three paragraphs on the last page,” said Jim Gaffney, a former general development officer at USAID’s Bureau for Food Security. “It never says you should not work in African countries. But it’s obvious it’s not terribly important to them.”
According to one American researcher, “We were learning from African colleagues about genetic sources of disease resistance that we could bring over. … It was a two-way street.” Courtesy of Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh
Africa just surpassed Asia as the continent with the largest number of people facing hunger, according to the annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report released last week by a cohort of United Nations agencies. Swaths of the continent are seeing temperature rises up to 1.5 times the global mean, which imperils food security, ecosystems, and economies, and has fueled mass displacement and migration. Floods, heat waves, and droughts forced 700,000 people out of their homes in 2024, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization. A growing body of research has found food insecurity, climate change, and migration to be closely interlinked with geopolitical instability.
Gaffney said the State Department’s implicit deprioritization of Africa is likely to have created a chilling effect on the number of agricultural research and development proposals focusing on the continent, which could have serious knock-on implications for the global food system. “People say, ‘Well, it’s good, it’s great that we’re doing these things for these low-income countries,’ but it’s also great for U.S. research,” said Gaffney. “We solve problems in Africa, and those same problems might hit our shores someday here in the U.S., and we’ll be ready for them.” The other major change in the call for applications was the erasure of climate-related research priorities.
Across the country, universities followed the guidelines: They stripped their submissions of mentions of “climate change” and pivoted to “desirable” geographies.
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David Hughes, the former director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Current and Emerging Threats to Crops at Penn State, which had supported Boubacar Gaoh’s work in Niger, said his team swapped out terms like “climate change stress” for “drought” in their application. Hughes believes that the State Department was “running these proposals through word search or AI.” The State Department didn’t respond to a question about their decision-making process, but the effects of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have persisted long after it was disbanded.
The Penn State lab also expanded its geographic range. Their application, shared with Grist, listed Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Nepal as proposed target countries. It did not mention supporting Boubacar Gaoh’s efforts in Niger. “We did, of course, maybe do a little more in this hemisphere. Although I point out that this hemisphere includes West Africa as well. I don’t think they know their geography,” said Hughes. Ultimately, the lab’s application was denied.
In a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last June, Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who represents Mississippi, asked Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, for assurances that specific innovation labs, including a Mississippi State University lab focused on fisheries, would be protected from budget cuts.
“The lab’s work illustrates the proverb, ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.’ This is exactly what the MSU Fish Innovation Lab is doing,” said Hyde-Smith at the hearing. “Rather than giving other countries food, we are teaching them how to feed themselves through modern aquaculture practices.”
The next iteration of innovation labs is starting to take shape. A preliminary list obtained by Grist reveals that approximately seven new project proposals have advanced to the next and final stage of the application round. The labs advancing are from institutions almost exclusively in Republican-majority states. Kansas State University, Mississippi State University, the University of Florida, two labs at Alabama’s Auburn University, South Carolina’s Clemson University, and the University of Georgia were all asked to submit a full proposal, according to multiple sources familiar with the State Department’s new program. The work led by Clemson features a collaboration with the University of Hawaiʻi, making it the only lab with blue-state representation.
Sources told Grist that the team behind the Mississippi State proposal is from the very same fisheries lab that Hyde-Smith had publicly lobbied Vought for. The lab declined Grist’s request for an interview.
“It doesn’t feel like, by chance, it would just be red states receiving these awards,” said a former USAID official involved with the program who asked to remain anonymous.
Others are questioning whether the administration’s newfound version of the innovation labs will actually look all that different to the version that was culled. Carrie Seay-Fleming, an assistant professor specializing in food security and the environment at the University of Minnesota Duluth who has studied the impact of Feed the Future, found a surprisingly similar emphasis on “increasing productivity” and “market-based solutions” in the State Department’s language. “Which of course makes you wonder what the cancellation of the old programs achieved,” said Seay-Fleming.
A spokesperson at the State Department told Grist in an email that “applications are evaluated against the published criteria in the funding opportunity, without regard to the political characteristics of an applicant’s home state.” The spokesperson declined to clarify when grant awards would be finalized or announced, nor did they comment on changes to funding criteria. However, the spokesperson did note that the agency plans to obligate funds into awards by the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30.
The spokesperson said the Feed the Future Innovation Labs funding opportunity is evaluated to ensure it makes the country stronger, safer, and more prosperous. In order to align with national interests, foreign assistance and research investments must “directly benefit American farmers, researchers, and taxpayers, rather than being shaped by the priorities of the prior administration,” the spokesperson added.
Among those invited to advance was the Innovation Lab for Peanut at the University of Georgia, which worked with peanut farmers in roughly 13 countries but focused on Senegal, Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, and Zambia, and had been a participant in the earlier version of the USAID program. After the collapse of USAID, the lab was forced to close. When the administration resurrected the funds, former lab leadership decided to apply for the funds and see if they could rebuild much of the work they had been doing beforehand. Jamie Rhoads, former assistant director at the peanut lab, wasn’t optimistic about their chances.
“We tried to globalize it a little bit, and shifted the language a little bit toward the more safer, stronger, more ‘America First’ kind of language,” said Rhoads, who contributed to the new proposal. “We kind of made a pitch for the sake of the U.S. industry, and also the potential domestic demand happening in Africa, [that] this is a valuable investment to make in Africa.”
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So it was a welcome surprise when, in June, the UGA lab advanced to the next, and final, stage of the State Department’s process. “It was kind of frustrating because we had to put all this ‘America First’ language into it, but a lot of what we were doing was already, in the best sense of things, using American goodwill and technology,” said Rhoads. “We were learning from African colleagues about genetic sources of disease resistance that we could bring over that are useful for our varieties potentially, or globally. It was a two-way street.”
Indeed, American farmers would also benefit from this type of research based in Africa. That includes farmers like Josh Johnson, who runs the Old Tyme Bean Company in Elloree, South Carolina. In recent years, as rising temperatures have made it increasingly difficult to grow varieties of heat-sensitive Southern crops, Johnson has pivoted toward growing cowpeas, a drought-tolerant crop that’s regionally popular and has long been a major food commodity throughout western and central Africa. But that introduced Johnson to a whole new threat: the cowpea curculio, a destructive weevil whose larvae feed on the seeds inside the legume’s pod. Within the last two years, the curculio has taken almost half of Johnson’s acreage of the bean plant.
Josh Johnson (right) and his sons grow crops like cowpea, a major food commodity in western and central Africa, on their family farm in Elloree, South Carolina. Courtesy of Josh Johnson
“You’ll start shelling those peas, and you’ll end up with maggots and larva coming out the shells,” said Johnson. “You can imagine how selling something like that would be terrible. … It is a booger-bear to control.”
To fight the wily bug, Johnson sprays the perimeter of his fields with pesticides. But it only does so much. When the small weevil senses a tractor’s movement, it balls up, drops to ground, and plays dead to protect itself, also making it nearly impossible to spot. Johnson said he desperately needs a new tool or technique that would allow him to better track and stave off outbreaks well before they spread.
A solution not unlike the on-farm pest surveillance Boubacar Gaoh had been working to develop half a world away.
Climate change is only making crop infestations like these worse, forcing farmers and scientists from South Carolina to Niger to contend with new pathogens, as warming temperatures reshuffle the geographic range of pests worldwide.“Some pests that you find now in Africa, in a few years maybe you will find it in America. So I think it’s really relevant to deal with them at the source,” said Boubacar Gaoh. “Pests, they don’t need visas to travel.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the ‘America First’ makeover of a global hunger program on Jul 28, 2026.
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