Major food crisis expected this year , expert warns

A Mauritanian agricultural expert has warned that extensive locust damage to crops and pasture will trigger a major food crisis in the mainly desert country this year. Already, destitute peasants from some villages have started drifting into the towns. “Mauritania is almost unavoidably heading towards a major food crisis this year because of the locust invasion”, Mohamed Ould Zeine, the government's Director of Food Security told IRIN on Wednesday, on the sidelines of a meeting of the Inter-State Committee to fight Drought in the Sahel (CILSS). “Instead of waiting till the month of November, when thousands of people will be potentially affected by hunger, I prefer to announce it now, knowing that several months are needed to mobilise food aid”, he added. Jean-Martin Bauher, the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Mauritania, said large concentrations of recently hatched locust larvae, known as hopper bands, had already munched their way through the new season's crops and pasture in the southeast of the country. “During a joint WFP/FEWS (Famine Early Warning Systems) mission to the east and south east of Mauritania, we saw that natural vegetation, pasture and crops, especially young sorghum shoots that had been planted early August, had been considerably eaten by bands of mature hoppers (about to grow wings),” he told IRIN by phone from the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott. “During the mission, we saw that some farmers had abandoned their fields completely destroyed by the hoppers bands, and had left for the towns,” Bauher said. That was during the first half of August. The locust infestation has since got worse, with new swarms of locally bred insects taking to the air in southern Mauritania. “Given the extent of the locust invasion, insufficient resources to treat it and irregular rainfall, Mauritania could experience a food crisis this year," the WFP official warned. Staunchly Islamic Mauritania, which is due to start exporting offshore oil in 2005, suffers chronic rural poverty following three years of drought. The capital Nouakchott is already circled by shantytowns of poor and largely unemployed people who have fled their villages or abandoned their dying herds as a result of poverty and the southward march of the Sahara desert. Agricultural experts say that even in a good year, Mauritania only manages to grow one third of the food needed to feed its 2.8 million people. This year locusts threaten to eat much of the sparse desert vegetation that normally provides pasture for the 17 million camels, cattle, sheep and goats of its mainly nomadic herdsmen. That threatens them as well as crop-growing farmers who eke out a living near the southern frontier with Senegal and Mali with a food crisis. Government officials told IRIN that the swarms of yellow grasshopper-like insects could destroy up to 60 percent of the pasture springing up during the current rainy season in the southeast of the country. Agricultural experts from Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and the Cape Verde Islands attending this week's CILSS meeting in Dakar were faced with the fact that locusts have already infested more than two million hectares of land in the Sahel. Mauritania alone accounts for 1.6 million hectares of the infested area and efforts to spray the insects with insecticide have so far proved woefully inadequate. Last week, Mohamed Abdallahi Ould Babah, the director of Mauritania's locust control campaign, told IRIN that up to 40 percent of the sorghum, millet and beans crops had been eaten by hopper bands in some parts of the country. The new swarms of locusts appearing in southern Mauritania threaten to follow others which have already drifted south into Senegal and Mali, causing the worst invasion to hit West Africa for 15 years. The irony is that rainfall throughout the Sahel has once more been plentiful this year following exceptionally heavy downpours during the summer of 2003 which produced record crops and food surpluses in most countries in the semi-arid region. Delegates at the three-day CILSS meeting in Dakar said that without the locust threat they would once more be looking at a bumper harvest during the current 2004/5 crop year following last year's record of 14.3 million tonnes. “Given the rainfall and the state of the crops, we would normally be expecting a good year, with a grain harvest of 11 to 14 million tonnes in the nine member states”, CILSS spokesman Maman Oumar Farouk told IRIN. “But this could change once the impact of locusts on agricultural production has been better evaluated,” he added. Representatives of all CILSS member countries voiced fears about the impact of locust damage on this year's crops, but very few felt confident enough to say just how much damage the insects are likely to cause. “The states are ill equipped to concretely evaluate the direct impact of locusts on the quality and quantity of production, but this is an exercise that a joint CILSS/FAO mission will undertake in the nine CILSS members states in October”, Farouk said. The FAO is the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation which has urged donors to rapidly provide US$100 million to fund a locust control campaign in West Africa. Mali has so far made the boldest assessment. “If the current situation is not controlled, we could lose up to 440 000 tons, which represents a fourth of our overall production”, Bandiougou Camara, the head of Mali's agricultural statistics bureau told IRIN at the CILSS meeting in Dakar. Mali last year harvested a bumper grain crop of 3.4 tonnes, but has set a lower estimate for this year that currently ranges from 2.7 million to 3.3 million, depending on which weather and locust scenario materialises over the coming three months. “In areas such as Kayes (near the western frontier with Senegal), we fear a crop loss up to 20%," Camara said. "In Tombouctou (on the bend of the river Niger) where the insects have been reported in all areas we could lose up to 80, even 100% of production unless the invasion is brought under control,” he added. The main food crops grown across the Sahel are millet, sorghum, maize, rice, cassava, sesame and beans. Groundnuts and cotton are also widely grown as cash crops.