VORACIOUS caterpillars are ravaging plantations and smallholdings in Cameroon’s Eastern and Southern Provinces, eating almost all the plants and crops they reach, the agriculture ministry said on Monday. “Not a single green plant is spared, from bananas to cocoyams to groundnuts,” said a plantation owner reached by telephone in the Ngomedzap region, about 100km south of Yaounde. The agriculture ministry has already sent 300 litres of fungicides to treat plants, officials said, but an agronomist working in the capital said it was not enough to stave off disaster. Ngomedzap endured a similar plague of caterpillars in the 1980s, which was followed by famine. The ministry stated that the insects were eating the leaves on all the trees and destroying “almost all the cocoa plantations, the cassava and bean fields.”