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With Kenya suffering its worst locust infestation in 70 years, a company is empowering local communities to come up with sustainable solutions.
Locust swarms arrived in Kenya in late 2019, after climate change exacerbated a number of unusual weather patterns. The infestation soon spread eastward, also affecting Yemen, Somalia and Ethiopia.
Lobsters threaten the food security of millions of people as they devour crops and leave serious agricultural damage in their wake.
African Regenerative Agriculture Company The image of the insect is helping Kenyan communities to turn the problem around. Specializing in insect-based proteins that are environmentally sustainable for agriculture, she has devised a way to turn desert locusts into animal feed and fertilizer.
Affected communities are encouraged to harvest live lobsters and receive immediate payment via a mobile platform.
“We are empowering the individual to contribute to a solution that we believe is very powerful,” founder Laura Stanford tells Euronews Living.
“We see this as a complementary approach to fill in the gaps where FAO [the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization] it cannot fumigate due to the small size of the swarm, the settlement areas and the intensive cultivation areas. “
Funded by the Danida Emergency Fund, the company hopes that this alternative response will avoid future plagues of Kenya’s devastation.
How are locusts and climate change related?
Lobsters are invertebrate insects the size of a paperclip.
Invertebrate plagues have devastated societies since the pharaohs ruled ancient Egypt, and they still wreak havoc today. But desert locusts are particularly threatening, affecting the economic livelihoods of a tenth of the planet’s population.
They are described as gregarious and have been known to reproduce quickly. In addition, they can cover great distances, some species can travel 130 kilometers or more per day, according to National Geographic.
A swarm the size of Paris can eat the same amount of food in one day as half the population of France.
Locust pests and climate change are intrinsically linked due to the conditions in which they thrive.
During periods of drought, animals are forced to band together on uneven areas of land where the remaining vegetation is found. This means that they become more social and reproduce faster.
Some experts worry that these pests are even worse in a warming world. The appearance of locusts is estimated to have been caused by rising sea temperatures and recent heavy rains and unusual storm activity in the East African region.
These impacts are linked to the ‘Indian ocean dipole’, a climate system in the Indian Ocean that affects the climate from East Africa to Western Australia.
Preventing pests in African countries is particularly difficult due to the remoteness of the landscape. But scientists are analyzing past weather patterns and historical records to identify areas where swarms could occur, and then spray those areas with chemicals.
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