Global food security is at risk as plagues of coronavirus and locusts collide
If Covid-19 was not a story right now, desert locusts would be the biggest story,” Arif Husain, chief economist at the World Food Programme, told a reporter last month. But in the region spanning West Africa to India, both stories are now merging. With rising numbers of coronavirus cases and waves of locust swarms, hundreds of millions of people are finding themselves facing two plagues at once.
Locusts and virus particles are governed by similar laws of nature: ideal conditions lead to rapid, unthinking multiplication. The consequences for humans can be similarly devastating: formidable outbreaks, difficult to predict and control, that grind the wheels of civilisation to a halt.
Part of what makes the combination of the two plagues so daunting is that they both grow exponentially. Locusts increase their numbers 20-fold in the first three months of an outbreak, 400-fold in the next three and 8,000-fold in the next. With coronavirus, it took three months for the world to reach its first 100,000 cases, and a mere 12 days to reach the next 100,000.
It is no wonder that we refer to locusts and viruses alike as plagues.
Whereas the coronavirus outbreak probably began in a wet market in China, the locust outbreak began in a wet desert in the Arabian Gulf’s Empty Quarter, where heavy rains in May 2018 created ideal nesting grounds. The remoteness of the area made surveying and controlling the insects difficult. In 2019, they spread northwards to Iran and the Indo-Pakistan border and southwards into Yemen, where one generation bred undetected because of the difficulty of monitoring in the midst of the country’s civil war. The Yemeni swarm moved into the Horn of Africa and is now heading westward into the Sahel.
Simultaneously, coronavirus evolved from an outbreak into a global pandemic, reaching all of the countries battling the locust plague. It has shut borders in Iran, Pakistan and most of East Africa and West Africa, regardless of the fact that the caseloads across them vary. Part of the reason is that even where reported case numbers are low, there is a sense that they are higher than the official numbers suggest; and if they are not, they soon will be. One of the major issues the WHO faces in its data-collection efforts is how many coronavirus carriers are “asymptomatic” and therefore untested, becoming hidden cases.
Dr Chibuzo Okonta, the president of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in West Africa, says that there is “no clear visibility on the epidemiological situation” of coronavirus across much of the continent. Testing capacity is bare, he explains, though for the moment the mortality rate seems to be lower than other regions.
“One can only hypothesise as to why,” says Dr Okonta. “We need more transparency in the data.”
In combating any plague – insect or viral – data collection is everything. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation are the two international agencies tasked with tackling locusts and coronavirus, respectively. And they are fighting similar battles: locating outbreaks, assessing their size, tracking the spread and measuring the impact.
Cyril Ferrand, head of the FAO’s resilience team in East Africa, speaks of hidden cases in the locust plague, too. “We can only control the locusts we can see,” he says. “There are areas where the FAO doesn’t have access, and we don’t know how many locusts are there. Estimating the true numbers of the plague is impossible.”
But the wider impacts of both plagues, and the interplay between them, are obvious enough. As the locusts threaten the food supply, coronavirus threatens the supply chain.
Four of the countries battling locusts – Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen – were among the 10 countries with the greatest food crises last year, according to a World Food Programme report. June is a major harvest period for the whole region, and it is also expected by the FAO to be when the next generation of locusts starts to swarm. One swarm consumes daily enough crops to feed 3.5 million people.
Now, wage cuts and job losses because of coronavirus are reducing many people’s purchasing power, and lockdowns and border closures are driving food prices up for everyone.
Coronavirus has also hampered FAO control operations on the ground. Pesticide supply chains are severely disrupted. The FAO in East Africa expected a large pesticide consignment from India on March 17, but it has yet to arrive. Some are also sourced from Morocco, but manufacturers there are temporarily closed.
In the end, the key to overcoming both plagues at once will lie in the ability of governments to strike a careful balance between competing priorities. That is not a conversation between policymakers that will be resolved in days – it will take months or years.
For now, directing resources to co-ordinated efforts is the most important thing. The FAO has issued an appeal for $311 million. There is unease that aid budget cuts from rich countries will affect fundraising. If the money doesn’t come, “then the signal is clear that we have exhausted all the resources we could mobilise,” Mr Ferrand says.
A more difficult task, however, is figuring out how we prevent a situation like this from recurring. This week
The National ran a piece by two professors from the National University of Singapore elaborating on the links between rapid urbanisation, the encroachment of human civilisation on wildlife habitats and the rise of viral pandemics. The desert locust outbreak, precipitated by unusually heavy rains and cyclones linked to climate change, bears a similar relationship to long-term human activity.
Rectifying all of that will require much more than good science and sound policymaking. It will require deep introspection, and a fundamental rethink of how we live our lives.
Locusts and virus particles are governed by similar rules: ideal conditions lead to rapid, unthinking multiplication