Locust situation deteriorates as new swarms form - FAO

The locust situation in West Africa is deteriorating and new swarms of the voracious insects are forming in Mauritania and Niger, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said on Friday. It said more swarms would form in Mauritania and Niger during the coming weeks as well as in Senegal, northern Mali and northern Burkina Faso, where large hopper bands of flightless locust larvae have been detected. "The situation is deteriorating seriously in West Africa," the FAO said in its latest update on the locust crisis. But it warned that the locust invasion would soon move north across the Sahara desert to the Mahgreb as dry season winds blew clouds of the insects northwards towards the Mediterranean between October and March. "Most of the new swarms that are forming in the Sahel will move to northwest Mauritania and the Western Sahara from October onwards and breed, causing new swarms to form in early 2005," the Rome-based FAO said. "From October to March 2005, Northwest Africa will be reinvaded, probably on a larger scale than that which ocurred in the spring of this year," it warned. The FAO said this year's locust invasion, the worst in 15 years, had already caused "severe damage" to pasture, grain crops and vegetable fields in several parts of the semi-arid Sahel. Diakite Fakaba, the coordinator of Mali's locust control campaign, said new swarms of locally bred locusts would soon take to the air near the western border with Senegal and Mauritania. “The situation is evolving, with fourth and fifth stage larvae growing wings and starting to fly, especially in the far west of the country”, he told IRIN by telephone from the Malian capital Bamako. The larvae go through five stages of growth between hatching and growing wings to become a fully-fledged locust three weeks later. Stage five is the final period when they are at their most destructive. Agricultural experts estimate that over three million hectares of land have so far been invaded by locusts in West Africa, but the FAO said on Friday that only 300,000 hectares had so far been treated with insecticide. Fakaba told IRIN that in Mali the insects had infested about 630,000 hectares of land, but only 80,000 hectares had so far been treated. The authorities in Mali estimate that up to 440,000 tonnes of this year's grain crop could be destroyed - up to 16 percent of the total. Good rains had previously led the Malian Agriculture Ministry to hope for a harvest of 2.7 million to 3.3 million tonnes this year. Agricultural experts now say that given the extent of the locust invasion, the only way to win the war against the insects is to resort to large-scale aerial treatment. “Given that the insects are growing wings and start moving rapidly, and also given that the rains have rendered certain areas inaccessible overland, the only effective answer now is aerial treatment,” Fakaba said. Aerial treatment is costly and there is a shortage of crop-dusting planes in West Africa to do the job. But experts in Senegal reckon that one small plane can spray up to 4,800 hectares of land a day. Aircraft have begun arriving in the Sahel from Morocco, Algeria, Libya, South Africa and Brazil. In addition, the FAO has hired four crop-spraying planes; two for Mauritania and two for Mali. The FAO has appealed to donors for $100 million to fight the locust invasion, but so far the Arab countries of North Africa have been more conspicuous in providing practical help more quickly than traditional Western donors. That is undoubtedly because it is vital to destroy as many locusts as possible in the Sahel before they fly north to re-infest their own agricultural areas during the winter. “The success of control operations in West Africa is crucial if we want to reduce the new threat to the Maghreb countries,” Keith Cressman, an FAO locust information officer in Rome ,said.