Small locust invasion expected, control measures already financed

Locust experts have concluded that West Africa will experience a relatively mild invasion of the crop-eating insects during the coming rainy season and 90 percent of the money needed to finance control measures is already available, a senior official of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said on Tuesday. Clive Elliott, the head of the FAO's locust control group, said about US $30 million of donor funding was left over from the campaign to fight last year's locust invasion of the Sahel. A meeting of donors in the Malian capital Bamako last week had concluded that this carry over, along with additional money pledged by the World Bank and the United States, should be enough to cover 90 percent of this year's locust control campaign, he told IRIN by telephone from Rome. The donor conference, sponsored by FAO and the World Bank, followed a meeting of locust experts from seven countries in the Sahel which drew up two scenarios for this year's locust invasion of the semi-arid region on the southern fringes of the Sahara desert. Elliott said the most likely scenario involved an infestation less than 10 percent as large as the 2004 locust invasion, which was the biggest seen in the Sahel for 15 years. “It is very encouraging. It may be that only a few swarms will make it to the Sahel this summer,” Elliott said. “The probable scenario involves treating in the whole of the Sahel between 50,000 and 250,000 hectares, for an estimated US $25 million,” Elliott said. That action plan, covering Mauritania, Senegal, Mali and Niger, compares with last year's spraying of 2.5 million hectares of locust infested land throughout the Sahel with resources which arrived late. Elliott said the worst-case scenario for 2005 involved treating more than one million hectares in seven countries - Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Gambia and Chad. But he stressed that this was unlikely given that spring breeding by locusts in North Africa had been hampered by cold winter weather and intensive spraying in Algeria, Morocco and Libya. As a result, this year's southward migration of insect swarms across the Sahara desert from June onwards was likely to be much reduced. Elliott explained that if the first more probable scenario unfolded, the FAO would give $15 million of aid, the World Bank $6.5 million and USAID $600,000. That would provide more than $22 million of the $25 million needed to conduct an effective locust control campaign. The remaining $3 million would have to come from other sources yet to be identified. Elliott said several representatives at the donor conference had suggested that the FAO retain the remaining $15 million of the surplus carried over from last year as a locust emergency fund, which could be activated rapidly in the event of a new threat emerging. But he pointed out that donors would first have to agree to their money being reallocated in this fashion. Elliott said that if the worst case scenario occurred, the FAO would pour $24 million into locust control measures, the World Bank $11 million, the United States $500,000 and the Sahelian states $700,000. That would provide more than $36 million of the estimated $40 million needed and would again cover 90 per cent of the funding requirement. Locust swarms bred repeatedly in the Sahel between June and October last year and invaded the Maghreb from mid-October onwards. However, Elliott said Morocco, Algeria and Libya were able to carry out large-scale control operations until March, spraying over four million hectares in the Maghreb. “They made a big impact on locust population,” he stressed. In addition, the winter was unusually cold in North Africa, there was snow in the Sahara and the desert locusts suffered badly as a result. Elliott said the FAO should know how much money - most of which came from the European Union - left over from 2004 could be put into an emergency locust control fund by October or November, once this year's spraying operations in the Sahel have been largely completed. It would then open talks with donors or reallocating the funds, he said. Fakaba Diakite, the coordinator of the Malian government's locust control unit, said he was very pleased with the outcome of the two meetings in Bamako. “We agreed that this year's pressure from locusts would be less than last year and we have the advantage that money is available which we can mobilize rapidly,” he told IRIN by telephone from Bamako. But Diakite said that persuading donors to reallocate aid funds was not easy. “Mali has $8 million remaining with the FAO, of which $3 million have been earmarked for the purchase of pesticides and $2 million for flying hours, but we will not need them this year,” Diakite said. “These funds should be rechannelled to other uses, such as prevention for instance, but some donors do not like the idea,” he added.