Locust plague worsens and spreads to Chad

The plague of locusts sweeping south across the Sahara desert is now causing serious crop damage in Mauritania, Mali and Niger and has spread for the first time to Chad, agricultural experts and government officials said on Monday. Over the weekend, swarms of locusts invaded eastern Mali and started devouring crops, an agricultural official in the central town of Mopti said. "What I saw yesterday evening around 8 p.m. around Douentza on the way to Gao, was worrying : about four hectares of land was covered with locusts," Cheick Sidiya Diaby, the government's regional director of agriculture in Mopti, told IRIN by telephone. "Until then, the swarms, which consisted of 600 000 to 700 000 insects per hectare, had mainly been eating trees and grass, but now they have started eating crops too. If nothing is done, the consequences on people and their livestock will be incalculable," he added. Further east, in Niger, locusts invaded several arable areas in south and centre of the country at the end of last week, causing further damage to grazing land and crops, government locust control officers told the French news agency AFP. In Mauritania, where millions of locusts descended on the capital Nouakchott last week and devoured the greenery of its trees, lawns and gardens, government officials warned that 80 percent of the country's crops could be destroyed, leaving 600 000 to 800 000 people to face famine. More than 200 swarms of the flying insects which can eat their own weight of food in a day have so far been detected in Mauritania. Locust swarms have meanwhile swept east into Chad, carried by winds which aid workers fear will eventually take them into the troubled Darfur region of western Sudan. A Chadian official told IRIN that two swarms were sighted last week at Ati, 450 km east of the capital N’djamena. “When the swarms flew over Lake Chad, they caused damage to 30 to 60 hectares of food-producing crops, mainly millet and corn”, Ndoubabe Tigaye, the director of the plant protection unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, told IRIN by telephone from N'djamena. However, despite the intensity of the invasion, all the Sahelian countries are suffering a chronic shortage of insecticide and spraying equipment and vehicles with which to spray the locusts and prevent them from breeding. Mali has so far raised only one third of the US$3 million requested from donors to step up locust control measures. “To date, we have been invaded by 63 swarms, but we only have a third of the resources we need to treat the area of nearly 650,000 hectares that is currently infested”, Brahima Koni, the deputy coordinator of Mali's locust control campaign, told IRIN by telephone from Bamako. So far, he added, Mali only has 18 spray teams deployed on the ground. In Chad, the authorities only have four prospection teams, who have been sent out to search for locust swarms, but without the spraying equipment and pesticides necessary to kill the insects and render their eggs infertile. “We even do not have pesticides”, Ndoubabe complained to IRIN, adding that the Chadian government was about to launch an appeal for international assistance to fight locusts. At a two-day meeting on locust control in West Africa held in Algiers two weeks ago, Chad appealed for $7 million to treat up to 250,000 hectares. At the time, no locusts had been sighted in the country, but now they have materialised. In Algiers, government officials from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger and Chad tried to coordinate their strategies. They appealed to the international community for at least $58 million to help step up locust control activities using trucks and planes equipped with insecticide spraying equipment. The more affluent North African countries, which have had painful first-hand experience of locust plagues in recent months, also promised rapid technical assistance to their poorer southern neighbours in the form of experts, vehicles and pesticides. On Monday for instance, Morocco sent 50,000 litres of pesticides and two spraying trucks and three crop dusting planes to Mauritania. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said aid pledged by donors at the Algiers conference was starting to trickle in. "New contributions are coming in almost every day, but it takes time to translate donor contributions into action," Clive Elliott, an FAO locust expert told IRIN from Rome. "From the moment the funds are approved, we reckon it takes about a month to get the goods on the ground." "There is a good chance that a lot of the crops can be protected, but if you are asking me whether it is possible to stop the locust cycle in its tracks, it is more difficult," he added. Meanwhile, local people in the affected countries have resorted to fighting the insect invasion with their bare hands. In Mali, villagers have formed groups of up to 50 people who gather whenever they see locusts descending on their crops, and try to chase them away with sticks. When the insects descended on Nouakchott last week, city residents tried in vain to burn rubbish, tyres and dead leaves to create smoke that would drive them away. In many countries, villagers simply dig holes that they hope recently hatched flightless locusts known as hoppers will fall into. They then burn or drown them. But locust experts warned that the worst is still to come. “In the weeks to come, there will be many more locusts than those that have arrived so far”, Annie Monnard, an FAO locust specialist told IRIN from Rome.