President cancels holiday as locusts invade north

President Abdoulaye Wade has cancelled his summer holiday and set up an emergency task force to deal with a plague of locusts that threatens to invade the north of Senegal. Officials said swarms of mature locusts had begun laying eggs in the northern province of Matam, prompting fears of large-scale crop destruction by their offspring in a few weeks' time. "We are currently seeing lots of locust swarms entering the Matam region (from neighbouring Mauritania) and locusts have already settled over more than 10,000 hectares," Mamadou Moustapha Ndao, the governor of Matam region, told IRIN by telephone on Tuesday. A journalist based in the town of Matam, which lies on the frontier with Mauritania, told IRIN that the insects had already begun to strip leaves from trees in the semi-arid region and destroy new pasture springing up after recent rains. "Local rural authorities have very little at their disposal -- seven vehicles, five technical teams, 500 litres of pesticides and 14 drivers," the journalist said. Ndao said the damage to crops and grazing land had so far been limited and the authorities had managed to spray 3,000 hectares of infested cropland with insecticide. But the governor warned that the locusts entering Senegal were mature and had begun laying eggs. “If hatching is left to occur, there will be massive destruction," he predicted. Mamadou Oury Diallo, the head of the technical department of the Dakar-based Inter-governmental Organisation to Fight Locusts agreed. “A female can lay 40 to 70 eggs on three separate occasions, meaning a 1 square kilometre-large swarm can produce 50 million locusts," he told IRIN. Hungry locusts weigh only two grammes, but they can eat their own weight of vegetation every day, enabling swarms numbering several million insects to strip fields bare within hours. President Wade announced last Friday that his government was setting up a special task force to combat the threat of a locust invasion from the Sahara desert and was allocating an emergency fund of US$2.4 million to step up control measures. The armed forces would be brought in to help out, he said. "Senegal has declared war on the locusts and will do its utmost to fight this enemy coming from outside to destroy us," Wade said. The president cancelled a holiday he was planning to take this week in the island state of Sao Tome and Principe to deal with the expected crisis. Gambia, a small country totally surrounded by Senegal, has also sounded alarm bells about the locust threat. The government appealed last Friday for US$1.5 million of international aid to spray swarms that are expected to arrive from Senegal over the next two weeks. In Senegal, farmers are already warning that they could face hunger and financial ruin if their crops are destroyed. "Preventative measures need to be taken, especially regarding the young shoots of millet and rice so that the locusts don't destroy this year's food," Mamadou Diop, a representative of the farmers’ association of Matam told IRIN. “In addition to hunger, the danger for us farmers is that we bought seeds and seedlings with borrowed money,” he added. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned that West Africa could be facing its worst locust plague for 15 years. The insects began breeding in large numbers across the Sahel during last year's exceptionally wet rainy season. They then migrated north across the Sahara to the Mahgreb, but are now heading south again in large swarms, some of which have already devastated plantations of date palms in the oases of Mauritania. Some swarms have also been detected in Mali. Agricultural experts fear that large-scale breeding will take place across the Sahel as the locust swarms reach the southern fringes of the Sahara that are now turning green as a result of recent rain. The FAO has warned that “the consequences of a locust invasion on agriculture and livelihoods are unimaginable, scaring and threatening.” Last week, government officials from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger and Chad held a two-day meeting in Algiers to coordinate their anti-locust strategy. They appealed to the international community for at least US$58 million to help step up locust control activities using trucks and planes equipped with insecticide spraying equipment.