Scientists are criticising the Australian government for its $11 million plan to unleash herpes on its carp population.

The plan could lead to "catastrophic ecosystem crashes" and "constitutes a serious risk to global food security", researchers Jackie Lighten and Cock van Oosterhout warned in a letter published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution Journal.

Australia has a serious carp problem. European carp were imported for fish farming in the 1850s, but some were accidentally released into the wild in the 1960s. Since then, their population has exploded and now millions are clogging key river arteries. The fish now constitute about 80 per cent of the aquatic biomass in the Murray River and the Murray-Darling Basin. They're destroying the ecosystem and starving out native wildlife in the process, costing an estimated $500 million a year in economic impact.

Last year, the Turnbull government announced a new strategy to eliminate the fishy pest: releasing a strain of carp herpes into the wild to let the virus thin out the population.