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They marched over grassy plateaus and steep slopes, pounding the ground with sticks and firing shots into the darkening skies.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” says Mulualem Berhe, a 54-year-old farmer waving a plastic bottle filled with pebbles, thick plumes of smoke that envelop the trees behind him. A few yards away a pickup truck appears, teenagers huddle in the back, whistling and screaming, their eyes fixed on the horizon.
Almost everyone in Debrekal, a district of scattered farms near the northern Ethiopia city of Adwa, is enlisted in the battle against billions of desert locusts that descended in October and have devastated countless fields. The villagers’ methods are simple and traditional: smoke, weapons, and noise.
After an unusually long and wet rain, which created perfect conditions for breeding, what the UN called the “worst locust swarm in 25 years” has returned with a vengeance to the Horn of Africa.
In normal times, lobsters are rarely a threat. Desert locusts are a type of grasshopper that feed on vegetation but are usually solitary.
But when conditions bring them together, their behavior changes completely. Just two lobsters touching each other can create a connection that begins to form them into groups. This unlocks its destructive “gregarious” state that changes its behavior and even its color.
The rains help the swarms to form. Moisture makes deserts ideal breeding habitats and locusts feed on growing vegetation. In two generations, the number of locusts can be multiplied by 400.
They easily devour cultivated fields and when the food dries, they continue on their way. Gregarious wingless lobster “bands” move in the same direction, while adult winged “swarms” migrate through the air in search of vegetation.
Dry weather usually kills them naturally, but when things change, pests start. A combination of ideal breeding conditions and a lack of control operations can allow uncontrolled breeding, which is what happened in Yemen in 2018. Two cyclones months apart created long breeding periods that allowed numbers to grow 8,000 times and the war in the region meant that the locusts were undetected and destroyed.
Mulualem, who has a small field of teff and two oxen to till it, is one of the unlucky ones – his entire crop is ruined. “As our grandparents told us: if you make noise, the lobsters will go away,” he says. “But now there are so many, nothing gets rid of them.”
Last year, the plague destroyed 350,000 tonnes of grain and more than 1.2 million hectares (3 million acres) of pasture in Ethiopia. This year is expected to be even worse. Since January, locusts have razed more than 200,000 hectares (almost half a million acres) of farmland. Fueled by the rains, the number of locusts multiplied by 8,000, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Now the struggle to control them has taken another blow: the outbreak of war in northern Ethiopia between the regional government of Tigray, where Awda is located, and the federal government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
A security crisis as the locust invasion occurs puts the wider region at risk. Swarms have been reported in Kenya, as well as smaller ones in Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia. But with its vast swathes of fertile farmland, no country has been more affected, and none more crucial to regional efforts to control insects, than Ethiopia.
“Ethiopia is the hardest hit, it is the front line,” FAO’s Fatouma Seid said before war broke out.
Nearby Yemen, ground zero for the Horn of Africa locust plague, with insects typically present throughout the year, is ravaged by civil conflict and has been unable to control reproduction for many years. Somalia, which is also very precarious, poses similar challenges for containment operations.
Now there are fears that Ethiopia will lose control as well. An internal UN document seen by Reuters last week says efforts to combat locust swarms are believed to have stopped in Tigray due to the conflict. Air operations, which involve planes and helicopters for both surveillance and pesticide spraying, have ceased. Young men and some women, who faced the locusts last month, are now mobilizing for war.
That war may worsen an already fragile humanitarian situation. According to FAO, the recurring swarms had left one million people in Ethiopia in need of emergency food assistance in early April. Now, in Tigray, banks have been closed and supply routes blocked. About 600,000 people in the region depend on food assistance, while another million people receive other forms of support, all of which are now interrupted, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a published report. on November 7.
Not everything is lost. Ethiopia’s campaign against locusts is low-tech but labor-intensive and, especially in Tigray, quite well organized.
At the peak of the campaign in the region last month, local experts moved from village to village, gathering youth and relaying messages by phone to regional officials who tracked locust movements and identified areas for spraying of chemicals at night. In Mekelle, the regional capital of Tigray, computer scientists collected the information to generate daily insect maps. Every night at 7 pm, Atinkut Mezgebu Wubneh, the regional chief of agriculture, appeared on state television to update the public on the movements of the locusts.
These methods are practiced throughout Ethiopia, with varying degrees of success.
“Ethiopia has done a great job in terms of quantity,” says an FAO official. “In terms of areas where there are control operations, 60% to 70% of the entire region, including the Gulf countries, is found only in Ethiopia. And we are talking about a large country with very little capacity and where remote objectives can be very difficult to achieve ”.
Since the beginning of this month, Tigray and the rest of Ethiopia’s northern highlands have received a respite, as the swarms have moved south and east towards Somalia and Kenya. This gives the government time to readjust before the expected resurgence early next year. November 10 team of specialized lobster fighters Israel arrived to boost operations with the use of new technologies, including surveillance drones.
But important challenges await. When The Guardian visited Adwa in late October, local farmers were saddened by the confrontation that was brewing between their leaders and the Abiyan government in the capital Addis Ababa and complained that it was hampering efforts to defeat the lobsters.
“The federal government does not support us,” says Mulualem. “He’s trying to kill us.”
“We don’t get any support,” says Haregot Gebremedhin, a 72-year-old farmer and priest, who was frantically gathering his teff crop as a huge swarm of locusts gathered overhead. He and his wife echoed others in the area as they recalled the last major locust invasion in memory: the plague of 1958-59, during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie. Several thousand tons of cereals were destroyed and there was a severe food shortage – and famine – in the following years.
“We haven’t seen anything like this in our life,” says his wife, Belaynesh Woldemikael, pounding a piece of corrugated metal with a stick while her daughter sets a fire to ward off lobsters. “Is this payment for our sins?”
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