Serious crop damage anticipated as locust plague intensifies

Mauritania and Mali have issued preliminary estimates of heavy crop damage as governments across West Africa struggle to control a plague of locusts that is growing larger by the day. Mohamed Abdallahi Ould Babah, the director of Mauritania's locust control campaign told IRIN on Tuesday that hopper bands - concentrations of young flightless locusts - were invading fields in the southeast of the mainly desert country, destroying young shoots of sorghum, millet and beans. "In some places up to 40 percent of the crops have been eaten," he said. Mali, which last year harvested a bumper grain crop of more than three million tonnes, has meanwhile warned that it could lose 440,000 tonnes to locusts this year, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) reported. These gloomy estimates emerged as agriculture experts from across the Sahel met in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, to make a preliminary forecast of this year's grain harvest. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) meanwhile reported a new generation of locust swarms taking to the air in Mauritania. “Locally bred swarms have started forming in southeast Mauritania,” Mohamed Lemine, an FAO official attached to Mauritania's locust control campaign, told IRIN on Monday. “If we do not control these swarms, we will have bigger swarms, which will mature two weeks later, mate, lay eggs and give rise to a second generation," he warned. “Immature swarms are the most voracious, and these are the ones that are starting to form now”, warned Lemine's colleague, Keith Cressman, a locust control officer with the FAO in Rome. “The situation in Mauritania will give us a preview of what we can expect in Mali, Senegal and Niger”, he added. Cressman said the locust plague was likely to reach its height in most of the savannah lands of West Africa during October and November, just as this year's harvest of food crops gets under way. “The timing of the formation of the new swarms in the summer will coincide with the harvest of the summer crops, and there is a potential for significant damage in West Africa this year”, he warned. A three-day meeting of agriculture ministry officials from the Inter-State Committee to fight Drought in the Sahel (CILSS) began in Dakar on Tuesday to draw up a preliminary forecast for the coming grain harvest. Its report will also highlight areas of West Africa that are likely to suffer food shortages during the year ahead. Agricultural experts have estimated that more than two million hectares of land in the Sahel are already infested with locusts. Roughly three quarters of that area is in Mauritania. However Mauritania's efforts to spray insecticide on the swarms of mature yellow locusts breeding out of control in the south of the country have so far been woefully inadequate. Ould Babah, the head of the country's locust control campaign, told IRIN that only 60,000 hectares of the 1.6 million hectares estimated to be infested with the grasshopper-like insects had so far been treated. Control efforts in Mauritania are being stepped up with the help of ground-based spraying teams and crop dusting planes sent from Morocco and Algeria. But Ould Babah admitted that they were still inadequate. He estimated that Mauritania was only managing to cover 10 to 15 percent of its needs. “We have 29 treatment teams on the ground, including six from Algeria and two from Morocco, plus four light aircraft, three of which were provided by Morocco”, Ould Babah said. "We are now treating 6,000 hectares per day, but we need to treat 20,000 hectares per day in order to have any hope of controlling the locust plague," he added. In Mauritania, locust damage to the sparse desert pasture which nomads rely on to feed their herds of camels, cattle, sheep and goats is as critical as insect damage to the country's southern croplands. The arid country has only 2.8 million human inhabitants, but an estimated 17 million head of livestock. The FAO warned in its latest locust update last Friday that a substantial number of new swarms were expected to form during September in other Sahelian countries. Senegal's Agriculture Ministry reported on Monday that seven of the 11 administrative districts in the north and centre of the country were infested by hopper bands. It said 100,000 hectares had so far been treated by locust control teams coordinated by the army. Moroccan and Algerian spraying teams are already at work in Senegal. On Monday, a cargo plane from Libya arrived bringing 10 more prospection and control teams equipped with four-wheel drive vehicles and a fresh consignment of pesticides. The Senegalese government said Libya would also dispatch two crop-spraying aircraft to Dakar shortly. Another has been promised by Brazil. In neighbouring Mali, less than 40,000 hectares of an estimated 286,000 hectares infested with locusts have so far been sprayed, Diakaba Fakite, the coordinator of the government's national campaign to fight locusts, told IRIN. Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure and his team of 28 ministers announced on Friday that they were donating one month of their salaries to help fund the locust control effort. In Niger, swarms of locusts are breeding in large numbers on the southern fringes of the Sahara desert in the far west of the country and are heading southwards towards the country's main millet growing areas in the Niger valley. However, the government in Niamey announced last week that so far only 9,000 hectares of land had been treated. Agricultural experts stressed that it was much simpler to treat the hopper bands of flightless larvae than the swarms of mature locusts, since the latter are airborne for much of the day. “It is easier to treat larvae as they do not move much," said Lemine, the FAO officer in Mauritania. "But once they have formed swarms, the locusts become a moving target requiring more energy to treat; you need to track them throughout the day, and wait for late afternoon or early morning to treat them." The FAO has estimated the cost of locust control operations in West Africa at US$100 million, but only a third of this sum has so far been committed by donors. The Commission to Fight Desert Locusts in the Western Region (CLCPRO), an organisation that groups the Arab countries of north Africa and their southern neighbours in the Sahel, said in its latest assessment on 31 August that 4.3 million hectares of land throughout West Africa would have to be treated with pesticides during the coming months. Everyone involved in the fight against locusts realises that a concerted control campaign is required throughout West Africa to prevent swarms left untreated in one country invading a neighbouring state. This explains the rapid and conspicuous help given by the Arab states of North Africa to their poorer Sub-Saharan neighbours, even though aid from traditional western donors has been slow to materialise. Mauritania's Rural Development Minister, Ahmedou Ould Ahmedou, told IRIN on the sidelines of a locust control meeting in Dakar last week: “Mauritania is the corridor through which locusts pass from north to south and from south to north. It is also the ideal reproduction zone, thanks to the current ecological conditions which are favorable to locust breeding. Fighting locust in Mauritania means fighting them in other countries too since our swarms will potentially be found later in these countries”.