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Since 2019, East Africa has been desperately trying to control a devastating invasion of desert locusts. The long rains that typically fall in the region from March to May this year are likely to allow another generation of locusts to mature, further threatening crops and livelihoods.
This would be an additional blow to food security in East African countries, which are also facing economic disruption in the response to the coronavirus pandemic.
In the region, swarms of desert locusts covered more than 2,000 square kilometers, such a large area in Lake Tana in Ethiopia, in April alone.
Swarms of this size are made up of billions of insects, which can destroy vegetation, eating more in one day than the combined population of Kenya and Somalia..
Ethiopia and Kenya are currently the most affected by the locust infestation.
New lobster waves are forecast for the coming months in Kenya, southern Ethiopia and Somalia, as seasonal rains create favorable breeding conditions.
“The next generation of swarms will occur in late June or early July,” says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
The timing is particularly worrying as this would coincide with the start of the harvest season.
Annihilated crops
Desert locust swarms strip nearly all of the green vegetation from crops and trees over vast areas, leaving devastated fields and pastures behind and putting farmers and herders at risk of severe food shortages.
More than 25 million people in East Africa are forecast to experience food insecurity in 2020 with locust infestations exacerbating the situation.
Some farmers lost 90 percent of their crops in the first wave of lobster that hit Ethiopia, says Yimer Seid of the South Wollo agricultural department in Ethiopia.
“I visited families that do not have food at home. They sold their animals,” he says.
Perfect conditions for desert locusts.
A disastrous combination of circumstances fueled the current desert locust plague.
In 2018, two cyclones in succession unleashed rain in the immense sandy desert in the southern Arabian Peninsula known as the Barrio Vacío. The wet sand and growing vegetation provided favorable conditions for lobsters to thrive.
Solitary desert locusts are usually harmless. However, if they are dense enough, insects change behavior and even appearance, forming large groups that devour everything in their path. Groups of young wingless locusts form bands, eventually maturing in fast-moving swarms.
In the Empty Quarter, locusts inadvertently multiplied for three generations, increasing their original number 8,000 times before swarms migrated across the Arabian Peninsula to Yemen.
Locusts are common in Yemen, but their ongoing civil war has devastated the country’s ability to monitor and fight insects.
From Yemen in 2019, desert locust swarms traveled north to Iran and then to Pakistan and India.
They were also carried by the wind through the Red Sea to northeast Ethiopia, southern Eritrea, and Somalia, where higher-than-average rains during the summer of 2019 allowed locusts to proliferate.
Lobster crisis ongoing
It was then that FAO declared an emergency, increasing and prioritizing monitoring teams and efforts.
“We started tracking everything quickly because we knew the situation would be out of control very quickly,” says FAO’s Cressman.
But even though FAO and other organizations moved as fast as they could to stem the spread of locusts, their numbers meant they were already difficult to control.
In December 2019, insects began to invade Kenya in what became the worst outbreak the country has experienced in 70 years.
To make matters worse, East Africa’s short rains, which typically fall from October to December, continued into 2020, allowing this first wave of swarms to mature and start laying eggs.
Now, the region has to fight this new generation as it hatches, before creating the new swarms planned for June.
Fighting locusts
Locust swarm management is best done even before they form. Regular monitoring is essential, since a small number of insects can be controlled with relative ease.
“It is not difficult to kill a lobster. You put pesticide on the lobster and it dies,” says Cressman.
Typically, this is done by ground crews spraying pesticides from hand tanks, reinforced by aircraft or helicopters.
Read more: Why are locusts so destructive in East Africa?
The problem with the current infestation is its large scale, he says.
“It’s like a forest fire. If you find it really small like a campfire, you just put it out. But if you miss it, it turns into a forest fire, and the problem becomes much more difficult and expensive to control.”
Essence time
Countries like Kenya, which have little recent experience with locusts, took a few months to establish control operations. With lobsters multiplying exponentially, that is valuable wasted time.
Authorities in affected countries have already sprayed pesticides on thousands of hectares of land. But if the weather conditions don’t dry up, that might not be enough.
Control operations are lagging behind: In April, only a quarter of the area affected by locusts was treated. Lobster populations are expected to increase 20 or even 400 times in the coming months.
Lobsters multiply faster than control operations.
Helping hands
Spraying is not the only way to resist the devastation caused by locusts.
In Ethiopia’s South Wollo Zone, the community worked together in 2019 to bring in the harvest before locusts could devour them.
“We harvest the crops in cooperation with everyone,” says Yimer Seid. “There would be around 100 people in a large field … all volunteers from the region.”
You’ve also seen more examples of people in the community sharing crops and food with each other to make sure people don’t go hungry.
Two crises at once
The coronavirus pandemic makes such community action much more difficult. Although Ethiopia is not under strict blockade, the movement of people is restricted by a national emergency decree.
Typically, agricultural officials in South Wollo would monitor locusts in the field, Seid explained. Farmers now send their reports online or by phone, making it difficult to assess the situation.
Overall, however, monitoring efforts and pesticide spraying operations continue in Ethiopia, as locust control counts as an essential service.
But with new swarms on the way, Ethiopia desperately needs to expand its operations, says FAO Ethiopia’s Fatouma Seid. This should include “more ground equipment, more government vehicles, and more ground pesticides in addition to air traffic control.”
However, the current stock of pesticides will only affect lobster control in Ethiopia until June, she says.
As for neighboring Somalia, the country currently has enough pesticide on hand to spray around 2,000 square km.
That will cover the first phase of hopper control (juvenile lobster, which cannot fly) until July, says Alphonse Owuor, FAO Somalia Crop Protection Officer.
Owuor says more pesticides are available if needed.
“We have been in constant contact with the supplier since the end of 2019. They know our requirements for the rest of the year and are on standby should we urgently need more supplies.”
Anticipating future invasions is difficult
African countries are much better equipped to deal with the locust threat than they used to be.
In the past, locust infestations were regularly spread across the continent. In the 1950s, insects made their way through countries in West and East Africa to India and Pakistan in a plague that lasted 13 years.
But in recent decades, thanks to better monitoring and control, infestations have tended to last less time and cover less area. Ethiopia and Somalia, for example, have not experienced an outbreak on this scale in 25 years.
Now, however, predicting locust invasions has become more difficult as weather patterns become more erratic due to climate change.
“The desert locust is just a long, continuous story,” says Cressman. “It’s about discovering the current chapter in that story.”
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