A team of 2,500 pest control specialists are battling with local people to prevent locusts ravaging parts of east China's Shandong Province.

Thanks to the joint efforts, work to clear locusts from 258,660 hectares of wasteland has had good results, and is expected to finish by the end of this month, according to Ren Baozhen, an official with the Shandong Provincial Agriculture Bureau.

"Destroying the pests' environment is the most effective way to bring the situation under control," the official said.

The team was divided into 55 groups spread over dozens of counties near the Yellow River estuary.

They were required to keep an eye on local locust numbers around the clock, and report to their headquarters on a daily basis, sources with the bureau said.

The province's anti-locust campaign in recent years has been largely successful, with thousands of hectares of farmland being kept free from the threat, said Ren.

In Hekou District of the city of Dongying, locusts have previously attacked, with an average of 60 locusts per square meter in 1998.

That figure has currently declined to under 0.2 locusts per square meter.

This came after the Ministry of Agriculture established a locust prevention area in 2001, said local official Yang Qingchen yesterday.

According to Ren Baozhen, in the past several years more than 40,000 hectares of similar protection areas have been set up.

To deal with the threat this year, new plant species have been grown in the worst-hit areas to replace the plants locusts like to eat.

Other methods of combating the problem include applying environmental friendly pesticides and using the pests' natural enemies.

Shandong is one of the country's largest agricultural provinces. Locusts have been a problem since 1998. Statistics show that the number of locust-hit land was 400,000 hectares in 1998.

Large-scale prevention and elimination of locusts began in early June when they began to hatch.

Shandong is an important base for China's grain production. Any slacking off in the anti-locust campaign could seriously affect the province's cereal yield.

In May, the Ministry of Agriculture warned that this year could be a tough time for pest control.

Locusts were predicted to affect 2 million hectares of land and 24.6 million hectares of prairie nationwide.

(China Daily June 24, 2005)