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By Tiksa Negeri
KOMBOLCHA, Ethiopia, Oct. 20 (Reuters) – Ten-year-old widow Marima Wadisha screamed, threw stones and in desperation even fired bullets at locusts descending on her sorghum fields in northeastern Ethiopia.
But the swarms of insects were so relentless that his entire crop, his family’s only source of income, was destroyed.
“They did not leave for a week. We were left with an empty crop, we tied our waists and we cried day and night. How can (I) feed … my children like this,” she said, surrounded by five of them while holding a damaged packet of sorghum.
The locust invasion is Ethiopia’s worst in 25 years, says the United Nations food agency, FAO.
It has damaged some 200,000 hectares of land there since January, threatening the food supply (a single one-square-kilometer swarm can eat as much food in a day as 35,000 people) and the livelihoods of millions.
It is part of a unique succession of swarms that have ravaged East Africa and the Red Sea region since late 2019, and the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated the crisis this year by disrupting the supply chain of pesticides and other FAO equipment to fight. Against them.
“The biggest challenge now in the region is here in Ethiopia and we are working on that together with our partners like FAO,” said Stephen Njoka, East Africa Director of the Desert Locust Control Organization for East Africa.
Conflict and chaos in Yemen, where some of the swarms originated, have made it impossible to spray pesticides by plane at the source. That, combined with unusually heavy rains, has increased swarms spreading across Ethiopia.
The World Bank has said that the insects could cost East Africa and Yemen $ 8.5 billion this year, and Fatouma Seid, the FAO representative in Ethiopia, fears the pattern of destruction will repeat next year.
“The infestation will continue until 2021. We are being re-invaded and the swarms will then go to Kenya,” he said.
(Reporting by Tiksa Negeri Written by Giulia Paravicini Edited by Maggie Fick and John Stonestreet)
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