At least US$ 58 million needed to tackle locust threat

North and West African leaders and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have made a fresh appeal for at least US$58 million to tackle growing locusts swarms that threaten to decimate crops across the region. The request came after a two-day meeting in Algiers of FAO officials and government ministers from Algeria, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal and Tunisia. Mahmoud Sohl, the FAO director of plant protection, said on Thursday that the Sahelian countries had estimated their immediate needs at US$58 million. That would allow them to spray 2.9 million hectares with insecticide using trucks and crop-dusting planes, he told IRIN by telephone from Rome. "In a higher level scenario, 4.5 million hectares would need to be treated, costing US$83 million," Sohl said. FAO experts reckon that a desert locust eats its own body weight or two grams of food every day. One tonne of locusts, a very small portion of an average swarm, eat as much food in one day as 2,500 people. Locust swarms, which are capable of travelling more than 100 km in one day, a capable of destroying huge swathes of crops. North African countries, who attended the Algiers meeting on Monday and Tuesday, have painful first-hand experience of locust plagues in recent months. The promised rapid technical assistance to their poorer southern neighbours in the form of experts, vehicles and pesticides. Algeria, for instance has already spent an estimated US$40 million to treat 2.6 million hectares, one of its delegates said. The Algerian government has pledged to send intervention teams with 48 vehicles and 80,000 litres of pesticide to Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Senegal. International donor assistance has fallen far short of the funds required, despite numerous appeals over the past few months. "Why don't you declare war on migrating locusts whose capacity for destruction of human lives is far greater than the worst conflicts?" Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade wrote in a letter to the leaders of the United States and France earlier this month. To date, donors have only provided half of the US$18 million previously sought by the FAO to tackle locusts in the Sahel. The FAO allocated US$2 million of its own funds, while other donors gave a total of US$7 million. "The FAO is taking this opportunity to launch anew its appeal to the international community for urgent and substantial anti-locust assistance," FAO Director-General Joseph Tchikaya told the Algiers meeting. Sohl said that since the Algiers meeting closed three European countries had expressed interest in contributing to the locust control campaign. Clive Elliott, a senior officer of the FAO's locust programme in Rome, said the West African governments were already pouring heavy resources nto the campaign and donors should match their efforts. "When developing countries contribute that much to this serious problem, it is expected that the international community could contribute even more," Elliott told IRIN on Thursday. "In the past, locusts even moved to southern Europe," he warned. "It is important to control the plague." FAO estimates that some 16 million hectares have already been destroyed by the locust swarms, including date palm plantations in central Mauritania. In a statement issued on Tuesday, FAO said the number of locusts moving into Mauritania, Mali and Senegal from the northwest have increased over the past two weeks. It said that intensive control operations had taken place in North Africa since February and had helped to improve the situation, but now the focus must move south to the Sahel. "In the Maghreb countries, the situation is gradually coming to an end. We are expecting remaining swarms to go down to the Sahel," Elliott said.