Famine warning as locusts invade the capital

A swarm of locusts has stripped the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott bare of greenery. Agricultural experts warned on Thursday that the desert nation could face famine unless voracious swarms of the insects spreading south across the Sahara are brought under control very rapidly. “The situation in Mauritania is extremely serious and will get even worse in three to four weeks time if nothing is done as the first generation of locusts will breed and start forming new swarms”, Mohamed Lemine, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) official in charge of the FAO programme to fight locusts in Mauritania told IRIN. “The impact on the resources of farmers and livestock herders will be extremely serious and could lead to famine if nothing is done”, he added. Agricultural officials have so far reported the sighting of 200 swarms in the country. On Wednesday morning, the skies over Nouakchott clouded over and many residents thought a sandstorm was coming. But instead, millions of locusts descended on the city of more than 600,000 people and proceeded to devour the greenery of its trees, lawns and gardens. Within a few hours they had turned brown and half the city's plant life had been demolished. The insects, which can eat their own weight in food each day, even munched their way through the turf of the national football stadium. City residents tried in vain to burn rubbish, tyres and dead leaves to create smoke that would drive the insects away. But overnight, the swarm rose up and departed towards the north, leaving as swiftly as it had arrived. "May God forgive us," said Ahmed, a petty trader in Nouakchott as he surveyed the desolation left behind. "It is as if Allah is angry with us. In the holy scriptures it says that locusts were one of the plagues sent by Allah to remind people of the existence of a greater force." The FAO warned in an update on Thursday that the locust infestation was likely to continue unabated throughout the semi-arid Sahel zone of West Africa and could even reach the troubled Darfur region of Sudan. “In the coming weeks, more swarms are likely to appear in West Africa, including Chad, and some may even reach western Sudan. There is also a slight risk that swarms could reach northern Burkina Faso," it said. “More breeding will occur from August onwards and the first new swarms could start to form by mid-September, seriously threatening crops that will be ready for harvest, " the FAO warned. " Soon after this, the swarms are likely to reinvade the north and northwest unless conditions remain unusually favourable in the Sahel to allow another generation of breeding." While Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya have so far been reasonably successful in spraying concentrations of locusts that have developed over the past few months in north Africa, the poorer Sahelian countries further south are woefully ill-equipped to treat the swarms of insects that are now moving across the Sahara desert to feed on the greenery sprouting up following the start of the rainy season. “The government is trying to mobilise all means possible to fight the locusts, notably the army, but these efforts still fall well short of our needs”, Mohamed Abdallah Ould Baba, the Director of the Mauritanian Centre to Fight Locusts told IRIN. Mauritania needed 60 teams equipped with vehicles and pesticides, to treat between 800,000 and one million hectares with insecticide at a cost of US$16 million to US$20 million, Ould Baba said. But he lamented that only eight locust control teams had so far been deployed in the country and current plans only provided for the creation of five more. “If nothing is done, the whole of this year’s (agricultural) production will be lost”, Farr Abdoulaye, a UN World Food Programme (WFP) official in Nouakchott told IRIN, noting that farmers in the south of the country had already been impoverished by three consecutive years of drought, forcing WFP to provide them with food aid. Ould Baba of the Mauritanian Centre to Fight Locusts noted that during the last plague of locusts in Mauritania, between 1993 and 1995, farmers lost between 30 percent and 100 percent of their crops and pasture. At a forward planning meeting of UN humanitarian officials in Dakar this week, the delegate from Mauritania warned that major crop destruction by locusts was likely to hasten the exodus of destitute farmers and herdsmen to Nouakchott and Mauritania's other main towns. These are already ringed by miserable shantytowns packed with unemployed people. Delegates from all the other Sahelian countries most affected by the locust invasion warned that major crop damage was expected unless the swarms that had begun laying eggs in Senegal, Mali and Niger could be sprayed with insecticide by the end of August. One representative from Mali said the authorities there were rapidly moving towards a worst case scenario, under which 800,000 hectares would have to be sprayed with insecticide- nearly three times the area originally anticipated. Mali had until recently been expecting a good cereal harvest of around four million tonnes, but this could be reduced by between 20 and 50 percent as a result of locust damage, he warned. Another speaker from Niger said bluntly: "We are now facing a catastrophic scenario." He said increasing insecurity in the desert north of the country had made it impossible to spray swarms of insects that had settled there. Food shortages resulting from locust damage to desert pasture and oasis crops were likely to aggravate growing discontent amongst people in the remote region, he added. The UN representative from Niger said there was a one-month time window left in which to spray. "If this does not happen, there will be famine," he predicted.