Africa, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines

ENVIRONMENT-AFRICA: Biblical Plague Destroys Crops

Julio Godoy* - Tierramérica

PARIS, Oct 1 2004 (IPS) - A plague of desert locusts, which for the past year has been devastating crops in the countries of the Sahel in West Africa, is expected to worsen in the coming weeks if international aid does not arrive to help stop it, say experts with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

If the Schistocerca gregaria’s reproductive cycle is not interrupted in October, the locusts will wipe out the grains and vegetables grown in the Sahel and ”the infestation could spread to even more countries in Africa, threatening food security in a wide area,” said FAO director, Jacques Diouf.

This locust plague is the worst in 15 years and was triggered by abundant rains from June to August 2003 over much of the Sahel, the transition zone between the Sahara Desert and the more fertile lands that lie to the south on the African continent.

Humidity, high temperatures and wind created ideal conditions for the devastating locusts to multiply.

From October 2003 to August 2004, the clouds of insects spread through Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal (in the Sahel) and through Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia, in North Africa. New reports from FAO are raising fears that the locusts will reach northeast Nigeria and even Sudan.

Over the past year the plague has destroyed around seven million hectares of farmland – two million in Algeria alone.

The density of insects has reached more than 100 per cubic metre, and their biological cycle was accelerated by rains in the Sahel and adjacent areas since early May.

Normally, the Schistocerca gregaria, despite its name, is a solitary insect. But when its population increases dramatically, it alters its behaviour and moves in large groups to devour vegetables, grains and even the clothing and ”jaimas”, the tents typical of the region’s nomads.

The lines of trees that constitute the ”green belt” of the Sahel and protect its central plateau from desertification were almost completely destroyed by the locusts, an unprecedented occurrence.

In just one day, a ton of locusts can consume just as much food as could 10 elephants or 2,500 people, according to FAO.

Locust reports coming from southern Europe, and especially from Spain, prompted fears in the northern hemisphere spring and summer that the plague had reached the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

Farmers in Catalonia, in northeast Spain, and in Castilla y León, in central Spain, reported in June and July that clouds of locusts had destroyed their crops.

Regional governments, aware of the plague in the Sahel, reacted with insecticide fumigation campaigns, using highly toxic chemicals that apparently destroyed beehives and other harmless insects.

Keith Cressman, head of the FAO’s desert locust prevention efforts, told Tierramérica that the locusts reported in Spain and Italy are of different local species, unrelated to those of the African plague.

”So far, there is no reason to fear that the desert locust will reach southern Europe,” Cressman said.

The Sahel’s locust plagues of past decades have rarely crossed the Mediterranean, though it did occur in 1956, when they reached the western Spanish region of Extremadura, bordering Portugal.

In July of this year, apparently afraid that the locusts of North Africa would spread to Spain, Madrid sent fumigation aircraft to fight the plague across the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco.

Juan Peña, head of Spain’s campaign against the locust, defended the fumigation effort, saying, ”it is much easier to control the plague in the desert.”

But FAO experts say that only ”extraordinary winds” from the Sahel towards the north could carry the plague to Europe.

The U.N. agency estimates the anti-locust campaign in Africa will cost around 100 million dollars, and Diouf appealed to international donors to pitch in. To date just 37 million dollars has been pledged, including contributions channelled through the FAO and bilateral donations.

The FAO has re-established an emergency operations centre to work directly with donors, the countries threatened by the locust plague, and organisations capable of providing technical help towards a solution.

In North Africa, particularly Algeria and Morocco, large-scale fumigation operations helped stop the advance of the locusts June through August, but the invasion of insects is intensifying in West Africa.

The damages caused by the plague could be multiplied by the widespread use of highly toxic insecticides, prompting the FAO to try an organic pesticide based on metarhizium fungus, which kills the locust in a period of three to four weeks.

But the main concern is to prevent the wave of locusts from developing so much that it would be impossible to stop. The last major onslaught of the Schistocerca gregaria lasted from 1986 to 1989 and attacked 40 countries.

(* Julio Godoy is an IPS correspondent. Originally published Sep. 25 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)