February 10, 2003

USDA is providing $14 million in low-interest loans to help eliminate the boll weevil in Arkansas and Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Boll Weevil Eradication Organization (OBWEO) and Arkansas Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation are each receiving $7 million.

The funds will pay for various program costs including pheromone traps to detect weevil populations and carefully-applied treatments to eliminate the pest. This is the first time the OBWEO has received a boll weevil eradication loan from USDA. The Arkansas foundation has received loans every year since 1999, totaling more than $34 million.

Under this program, USDA's Farm Service Agency's (FSA) Boll Weevil Eradication Loan Program provides low-interest loans to nonprofit organizations that work collaboratively with state agencies, USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the National Cotton Council to eradicate the boll weevil.

Since its inception in 1997, the program has provided more than $500 million to eliminate the pest in Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. This effort increases profits for farmers and others in the fiber and textile industries. It also strengthens local rural economies throughout the South, and the American economy overall. This year, USDA will make $100 million in loans to battle this key pest of U.S. cotton.

In a related development, the Agricultural Research Service said eradication of the scourge of the South--better known as the boll weevil--is now a "major success."

The boll weevil wreaked havoc on the American cotton industry, with yield losses and control costs totaling more than $22 billion since its 1892 arrival in the United States.

As boll weevils spread, they forced radical economic and social changes in areas that had been almost completely dependent on cotton production. Many experts consider the boll weevil second only to the Civil War as an agent of change in the South.

For example, the year before boll weevils marched into Georgia in 1915, the state produced 2.8 million bales of cotton, said ARS. Ten years later, annual production was 600,000 bales. By 1983, it was down to 112,000 bales. A decade after joining the eradication program, Georgia cotton production rebounded to 1.66 million bales in 2000. The Georgia cotton industry, including farms, gins, warehouses, cottonseed oil mills and textile mills, now provides 53,000 jobs and an overall economic impact of more than $3 billion each year.

There have also been environmental benefits, as eradication has allowed cotton growers to reduce as many as 15 pesticide applications a season to just one or two, according to ARS.

Today, the boll weevil has been virtually eliminated from more than 6 million acres, and active eradication is in various stages of completion on more than 9 million additional acres in 17 U.S. states and in northern Mexico.

Hope for stopping the boll weevil had been bleak until the 1970s, when ARS research began to create needed tools. ARS developed an essential pheromone lure and trap, along with basic biological information about the pest.