Winged plague a big threat
The most serious outbreak of desert locusts in 25 years is spreading across east Africa and posing an unprecedented threat to food security in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries, authorities say.
Unusual climate conditions are partly to blame.
The insects fly together by the millions, and devour crops. They are forcing people in some areas to bodily wade through them.
An ‘‘extremely dangerous increase’’ in locust swarm activity had been reported in Kenya, east African regional body the Intergovernmental
Authority on Development reported this week. One swarm in the country’s northeast measured 60 kilometres long by 40km wide.
‘‘A typical desert locust swarm can contain up to 150 million locusts per square kilometre,’’ it said. ‘‘Swarms migrate with the wind and can cover 100 to 150 kilometres in a day. An average swarm can destroy as much food crops in a day as is sufficient to feed 2500 people.’’
The outbreak of desert locusts, considered the most dangerous locust species, also has affected parts of Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Djibouti and Eritrea. The authority has warned that parts of South Sudan and Uganda could be next.
The outbreak was making the region’s bad food security situation worse, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation said. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops have been destroyed.
The further increase in locust swarms could last until June as favourable breeding conditions continued, the authority said, helped by unusually heavy flooding in parts of the region in recent weeks.
Major locust outbreaks can be devastating. A major one between 2003 and 2005 cost more than US$500 million to control across 20 countries in northern Africa, with more than US$2.5b in harvest losses.