Sahel states and donors gear up to fight locusts more effectively

International donors and the governments of West Africa have agreed to activate a new mechanism to coordinate locust control measures more effectively and donors have earmarked funds to make it work, Clive Elliott, the head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) locust control unit said. Speaking after a week-long meeting of locust control experts and government officials in Dakar, Elliott told IRIN that the participants had agreed to set up the mechanism, known as EMPRES. This is designed to prevent a repetition of last year's confusion, when donors and governments in the region reacted late and in a poorly coordinated fashion to the biggest locust invasion of West Africa for 15 years. EMPRES stands for the Emergency Prevention System for Transboundary Animal and Plant Pests and Diseases. It is an early warning, research and rapid reaction programme that already operates effectively in the fight against locusts in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula. “Within the next two or three months, with the combined funding of all the donors, EMPRES Western Region will be up and running after a long period of searching for funds and support,” Elliott told IRIN on Friday. This should enable the Sahel states to be better prepared if fresh swarms emerge from the Sahara desert to ravage their crops at the onset of the rainy season in June. “The plan is to complete training and have teams prepared, to position aircraft and helicopters at an early stage so that they can be ready to control incoming swarms from the beginning,” Elliott explained, recalling that last year the first aircraft sent by donors only arrived on the scene in mid-September. He also noted that governments in the Sahel would be able to count on money and pesticide stocks left over from the 2004 locust control campaign. “Late disbursement last year means that there is a lot of unspent funds available this year, and that we are in a much better position to deal with the invasion,” Elliott said. “All affected countries have quite good stocks of pesticides, which is a good start for a possible campaign while they were struggling last year to get them”. EMPRES Western Region, which has existed on paper since 2001, will cover Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya in North Africa and Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Senegal on the southern fringes of the Sahara. Until now, FAO had lacked the funds to set it up, but last year's locust invasion of the Sahel, which caused heavy damage to crops and pasture in Mauritania and localised damage to crops and fodder in northern Senegal, Mali and Niger, triggered a rethink. Agricultural experts expressed fears that the locusts would return from their winter feeding and breeding grounds in North Africa in even greater force this year. However, Elliott said that unusually cold winter weather in the Mahgreb, with widespread snowfall, had reduced the risk of that. “At the moment we are expecting that there may be a reinvasion in the Sahel in June/July, but probably at a lot lower level than has happened in 2004, perhaps not at all,” he said. The FAO expert said the locusts already in the southern foothills of the Atlas mountains had been hard hit by the cold weather and intensive spraying. “When the temperature starts going up again maybe they will regain their strength, mature and lay their eggs in northwest Africa, maybe not, maybe only on a limited extent because Algeria, Morocco and Libya, have done a lot of spraying in the last few weeks,” Elliott said. He also noted that those insects which had wintered in the central areas of the Sahara desert had remained in their immature phase and were unlikely to breed massively in North Africa in the spring. “There has been no breeding in northern Mauritania, so there is not going to be any invasion of Morocco and Algeria of swarms produced in northern Mauritania, or northern Mali or Niger, so there is a big difference between 2005 and 2004.” Elliott said the likely scale of this year's locust invasion of the Sahel would become clearer in March/April once the extent of the spring breeding in northwest Africa was known. The locusts normally move south across the Sahara desert in June just as the rainy season and crop planting is getting under way in the savannah grasslands of the Sahel. Another locust expert present at the Dakar meeting said various donors had pledged multi-year funding to boost the capacity of individual governments in West Africa to control locust invasions and to make EMPRES work. Thami Ben Halima, the Coordonator of the FAO Commission for Fighting Desert Locusts in the Western Region (CLCPRO), the Algiers-based organisation which will run EMPRES in West Africa, said the African Development Bank had committed US$6 million over four years for preventive action. France had meanwhile pledged three million euros ($4million) to reinforce the capacities of individual governments, he added. Ben Halima said the European Union, USAID, Japan and Holland had expressed a willingness to provide complementary funding. Denis Jordy, the deputy head of the World Bank's Africa Emergency Locust Project, said meanwhile that part of a planned $64 million World Bank soft loan to finance locust control in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Gambia, would be earmarked for preventive measures. Participants at the Dakar meeting agreed to a series of coordination measures to be implemented in 2005. Elliott said these would incude a regional training session to instruct agriculture ministry officials in various locust control techniques. This would enable them to become trainers within their own countries on issues such as carrying out locust surveys and making better use of satellite images to identify suitable vegetation for locust breeding, he added. Elliott said government officials would also be taught how to set up mechanisms to monitor the impact of locust control operations on the environment and the impact of pesticide handling on the health of members of the spray teams. Fakaba Diakite, the coordinator of Mali’s locust control organisation, said his country was in a much better position to fight locusts this year. “ We have done everything possible to be ready in case of a fresh invasion,” Fakaba Diakite, the coordinator of Mali’s locust control unit told IRIN. “ Since January, we have developed an action plan to be sent to our development partners, we know which activity to undertake at which moment, we have established budgets. “