Karoo rains spark brown locust invasion
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SA’s drought-battered Karoo has another issue to contend with as brown locusts invade millions of hectares in the area, but authorities and experts are confident the situation is under control.
The department of agriculture, forestry & fisheries announced that Namibia is also affected.
The department has made six pesticides available to farmers in resource conservation centres in the Karoo and said it is confident it will be able to manage the outbreak together with the Resource Conservation Directorate and crop protection association CropLife SA.
Gerhard Verdoorn, CropLife SA's operations and stewardship manager, said the association first received reports almost three weeks ago about the outbreak, which had spread to the De Aar, Hanover, Richmond and Hopetown areas.
It mostly affects vegetation eaten by livestock.
The locusts have not reached maizegrowing areas and are limited to areas that received rain, where the vegetation is.
Verdoorn said brown locust eggs remain dormant underground for up to 17 years until weather conditions are right for them to hatch.
The much-needed rain in the Karoo in the past few weeks, after the worst drought in 115 years, and high temperatures led to the eggs hatching.
“If there are any good rains then everything in nature explodes,” he said.
“I think we are fairly well organised to [deal with] the locust outbreak. It’s not as bad as I thought it might have been because the western part of the Karoo hasn’t had rain yet.
“And I would expect that even if there is some rain now, the temperatures are not high, so this might suppress any potential outbreak,” he said.
Farmers still needed to remain vigilant and ensure they killed locusts with pesticides as soon as their eggs hatched and they came above ground.
What had made the locusts easy to control was that they hadn’t sprouted wings yet and could not swarm, which was the most dangerous stage since then masses could fly from one area to another.
In East Africa, desert locusts have invaded Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia and are destroying crops.
According to the UN, the East African invasion is the biggest the region has seen in more than 70 years.
The UN said the outbreak is likely to cost governments in the affected countries more than $138m (about R2bn) to control the locusts in the next four months.
The funds will be used to kill the locusts before they form swarms and to assist people whose crops or pastures have been destroyed.
Omri van Zyl, the executive director of farmer representative group Agri SA, said that unlike the East Africa region, SA hasn’t had to contend with heavy winds that had aided the rapid invasion of the locusts.