Rat-Plagued Laos Urged to Stop Eating Owls

When rats descended in swarms and wiped out an entire season's rice harvest, hungry Lao villagers supplemented their diets by hunting barn owls, snakes and other wild animals.

But now, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization plans to persuade villagers that protecting the pale-faced owls is a much better way to ensure their food supply. The owls are natural predators of rats, and one of them can eat a dozen rodents a day.

After traps failed and pesticides offered mixed results, the U.N. decided to breed the birds to end the rat scourge and educate villagers about their vital role in the ecosystem.

"Some people can joke about this, but it is a very good bird and can do a lot of good work," said Serge Verniau, the country representative in Laos for the U.N. agency, known by its acronym FAO.

"Some villagers eat the barn owls," he continued. "If they know the barn owl could be their ally to fight against the rodents, we are convinced they will change."

The owl breeding project is still in its planning stages, but Verniau said the birds would be distributed in the areas hit by the food shortages - the country's rural north.

Verniau said the rodent outbreak first hit the farming communities last year after flowering bamboo - which bloom every 50 years - provided the rats with a plentiful food source. The rats wiped out much of the November harvest of rice, cassava and sesame, leaving families with little to eat in a country where hunger is already widespread. The rodents have destroyed crops in seven provinces in the country's north.

The World Food Program has stepped in, distributing 5,600 tons (5,100 metric tons ) of rice to affected communities. It estimates the outbreak has left 130,000 people short of food in a country of more than 6 million people.

"People in some villages have lost everything. All their crops were destroyed last year. That is why there is an urgency for food assistance," Verniau said.

Elisabeth Faure, the food program's deputy country director in Laos, said the rat infestation is the sort of disaster - along with floods - that sends vulnerable families over the edge. Laos is one of the poorest countries in Asia, with one of two children under 5 in rural areas chronically malnourished and two-thirds of the population routinely facing food shortages, she said.

"When I went up to the north, farmers were telling stories of their rice huts shaking and a swarm of rats eating everything around them. It was like a sea of rats," Faure said. "Many people had lost absolutely everything. It is a big shock on top of a bad situation."

In the government-run Vientiane Times, Lao Minister of Labor and Social Welfare Onchanh Thammavong acknowledged the outbreak Thursday and welcomed the international food assistance. She did not comment on the plan to use owls to address the problem.

Biologists acknowledge that meddling with ecosystems carries risks, especially when new species are introduced. The U.N.'s plan would appear to be less risky, though, because the barn owl is an established predator.

Verniau said the barn owls will be part of a long-term strategy aimed at avoiding rodent outbreaks that repeatedly plague rural communities in Southeast Asia. A similar outbreak hit Myanmar's Chin state earlier this year and parts of Bangladesh, causing widespread food shortages and requiring relief from the WFP.

Barn owls - which stand about 10 to 15 inches (25-38 centimeters) tall and have a wing span of 41 to 47 inches (104-119 centimeters) - are increasingly being seen as a safe method of controlling rats.

Palm oil plantations have used them in Indonesia, Israeli and Jordanian farmers depend on them to protect their date plantations, and the city of Berkeley, California is considering installing a nesting box to attract them to a rat-infested city park.

Bounneuang Douang Boupha, director of the government-run Horticultural Research Center, said he believes barn owls could "prove useful" in his country's fight against the rats.

Faure said affected communities will have decide what works best for them.

"It's fine to make these recommendation but we need to go into fields and look at the history and how rats have affected people and what is best for them," she said. "Maybe it's barn owls or maybe it's a better trap."