Locusts threaten honey production in western Guinea

Swarms of locusts have invaded western Guinea from neighbouring Senegal and Guinea-Bissau and are devouring the foliage of flowering trees, threatening the region’s honey production, agricultural experts told IRIN. Honey accounts for 40 percent of farmers’ cash earnings in central Guinea, and it is particularly threatened in the Labe and Mamou areas, according to Abdulkarim Camara, Director of Agriculture at the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forests, who spoke to IRIN by telephone from the Guinean capital Conakry. Mohamed Lemine, an expert of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) who recently visited Guinea to evaluate the locust infestation, agreed that honey was an important industry in the area. He told IRIN that the authorities would have to choose carefully the pesticides used to control locusts so as not to kill bees at the same time in this sensitive environment. Camara said the first locust swarms entered Guinea from Guinea-Bissau in January. “At the moment, they are still in Middle Guinea, in the localities of Labe, Mamou and Kindia,” he added. The locusts are also viewed as a potential threat to tree crops in Guinea-Bissau, whose plantations of cashew nut trees are currently in flower. Cashew nuts are the country's biggest export and the main cash crop of the country's peasant farmers. Ari Toubo Ibrahim, the FAO representative in Guinea said the locust swarms had caused damage to a variety of crops since they arrived in the country last month. “ We estimate that desert locusts have munched away 4,000 tons of green matter in this period, including potatoes, vegetable gardening and mango trees”, he told IRIN by telephone. Ibrahim explained that most of the locust swarms which invaded the Sahel last year migrated north across the Sahara desert at the end of the rainy season, but a few swarms of pink immature locusts had moved south and east in Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. He said that Guinea, which had experienced no locust invasion at all for the past ten years, was taken by surprise. "We are worried by the locust invasion given the weak technical capacity of the Guinean government services and their lack of equipment," Ibrahim said. Senegal has sent three prospection and treatment teams to reinforce the four locust control teams mobilised by the Guinean government, but Ibrahim said the Senegalese were ill-equipped to operate effectively in the heavily forested and mountainous region. "The equipment sent by Senegal is unfortunately inadequate in the Guinean context because the trees here are tall, the grass is long and the equipment sent cannot spray the pesticide far enough," the FAO representative said. Camara, speaking for the Guinean government, appealed for more help in the form of control teams, vehicles, pesticide and spraying equipment. However, one locust expert told IRIN privately that although locusts might cause some damage in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, the scale of the infestation in both countries was relatively small. He said efforts to spray the swarms there with insecticide were unlikely to prove very effective.