While Pakistan declared an emergency earlier this month saying that locust numbers were the worst in over two decades, Chinese reports say that China could deploy about 100,000 ducks to its neighbor to help combat swarms of crop-consuming insects. Lu Lizhi, a senior researcher at the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Science, claims that a single duck could eat over 200 locusts a day, potentially making them just as effective or even more effective than pesticides. He also stated that as ducks like staying in groups, they could be managed with relative ease to maximize the removal of locusts.

An experiment using ducks will be conducted in China's Xinjiang province in the coming months, despite other researchers questioning the true effectiveness of ducks as biological control tools. Some supporting the effectiveness of ducks as locust control methods cite that in 2000, China deployed about 30,000 ducks from the Zhejiang province to the Xinjiang province to tackle the crop-eating insects. Meanwhile, some critics of this proposal say that ducks are reliant on water, and may not be suitable for Pakistan's more arid conditions.