Spring breezes
"The fact that the ants don't seem to have spread outside the originally affected areas is encouraging," says Shih Cheng-jen, executive director of the NRIFACC and NTU professor of entomology. He adds that as of the beginning of 2006, afflicted areas had been kept at around 10,000 hectares. However, he also admits that the situation within those areas has not markedly improved, because the ants reproduce too quickly. Workers exterminate half the population of ants, only to see the population immediately increase again by 30%.
Shih concludes that a lack of efficient coordination among government authorities is a key factor behind the lack of complete success. Currently, the government's control regime relies on local administrative units of central agencies to take charge within their jurisdictions, while the Council of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine handles coordination. Local governments are responsible for actual pesticide application, while the NRIFACC serves as a center for managing resources and technology, taking charge of keeping the public informed, measuring fire ant population levels in affected areas, and monitoring whether infestation is spreading to outside areas.
Because the city and county governments are only in charge of exterminating ants in farming areas, while fire ants have infested locations outside such areas, possibly even invading places such as industrial parks, military facilities, school campuses, roads and railways, parks and traffic islands, the current approach of distributing control tasks among a large number of organizations has led to a situation where "whenever fire ants fly past an area, the agency responsible for control measures changes!" says Shih. He adds that these local administrative units are overseen by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, and the Environmental Protection Administration--putting them outside the authority of local governments, and greatly compromising the efficiency of prevention efforts.
Presently, though the NRFIACC has created a reporting system that allows immediate handling of newly discovered infestations, the approach remains fundamentally passive. To achieve a more proactive approach requires thorough long-term monitoring.
The NRFACC's Wu uses the severely affected Taoyuan, Taipei, and Chiayi Counties to illustrate what is needed. These areas should regularly perform full-scale surveys, including locations where people do not normally venture, such as highway embankments and vacant lots that can easily become safe havens for fire ants to hide themselves and grow. However, the center has been constituted with only seven people and an annual budget of just NT$10 million--grossly deficient in terms of both manpower and financial resources for handling reported infestations, responding to queries, and managing the website, while allowing only two persons to actually perform surveys.
Lin Chung-chi cites Australia's efforts to fight fire ants. The Australians placed administrative functions, financial operations, research and development, and pesticide application all under the authority of its Fire Ant Control Centre, which was established with a staff of 600 and a three-year budget totaling around NT$5 billion. When the fire ants appear at any location, the center immediately dispatches personnel to handle it. Regular testing and monitoring is also performed, and the center's operations are given an extremely high priority within the government, with a ministry official put in charge.
Wu points out that because the government ministries in Taiwan overseeing the efforts to counter the fire ant lack entomologists on their staffs, and must rely on the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine for coordination, "too many ministries are involved, and it's not surprising that the Council of Agriculture is exhausted by the effort." He calls attention to the fact that the anti-fire ant campaign reveals a further complication in countering destructive non-native species: besides annihilating already discovered fire ants, preventing migrations and keeping more fire ants from entering the country are also important parts of the effort. In order to eliminate the threat during the "ten golden years" when it most achievable, these elements require that the effort be given higher priority so that the fire ants can be completely eradicated. Otherwise, fire ants may follow the lead of other non-native species that have established a firm foothold in Taiwan, like the apple snail, which has caused nearly NT$10 billion of damage to Taiwan's agricultural industry, and bittervine (Mikania micrantha) which has devastated large swathes of woodland.