FAO has just third of funds it needs to stop full-scale locust plague

A plague of locusts threatens to destroy the food crops of millions of subsistence farmers in West Africa over the coming weeks just as the plants are ripening for harvest. But the United Nations complained on Thursday that donors have only provided a third of the money needed to keep the insects at bay. Government officials in Mauritania and Mali, two of the worst-hit countries so far, told IRIN they were still woefully under-equipped with pesticide and spraying equipment. "The situation is about to become catastrophic in the next few days," Mohamed Abdallahi Ould Babah, the head of Mauritania's Centre to Fight Locusts, told IRIN by phone from the capital Nouakchott. "We're racing against the clock but it's an unfair race because we only have 10 percent of the resources we need to win it," he added. More spray teams and insecticide are desperately needed to kill a new generation of young locusts on the ground before they grow wings and take to the air in new larger swarms. Agricultural experts fear these would wreak havoc on fields of maize, millet, sorghum and rice right across the Sahel from Senegal to the Sudan. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a statement that international donors had so far only earmarked US$32 million for a locust control campaign which it reckons will cost $100 million. The Rome-based organisation said it had dipped into its own pocket to provide a further $5 million. "Around $100 million is needed to control the current locust upsurge and stop it developing into a full-scale plague," the FAO said. "Many African countries do not have sufficient funds to finance national control campaigns fully and avoid crop losses. Aircraft, pesticides, vehicles, sprayers. monitoring capacity and technical support are lacking in all affected countries." Mauritania has been hardest hit by the locust swarms which swept south across the Sahara desert from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia earlier this year. During August, the area of land infested with locusts in this mainly desert nation jumped to 1.6 million hectares from one million and Ould Babah said his country alone needed $20 million to halt the locust invasion. Farmers in Mauritania lost between 30 and 100 percent of their crops and pasture during the last locust plague between 1993 and 1995. This time around they are equally worried. Demolition course "Every green thing that pokes its head up from the ground is immediately demolished by the locusts," Mohamed Ould Bilal, who rears cows in the Trarza region of southwestern Mauritania, told an IRIN correspondent in the country. Low rainfall makes most rural Mauritanians even more dependent on their livestock than the meagre crops they are able to grow during the short annual rainy season which is currently in full swing. FAO figures show the country has 17 million cattle, sheep, goats and camels, compared to just 2.8 million human inhabitants. But now the animals must do battle with the locusts for food. A tiny fraction of a locust swarm can eat the same amount of food in one day as about 10 elephants, 25 camels or 2,500 people.

A goat herd runs away from a swarm of desert locust near Kaedi, Mauritania

And across the region, desperate times are calling for desperate measures. In northern Senegal, the local authorities in the coastal town of St Louis have offered local people a 50 kg bag of rice for every 50 kg of dead locusts they bring in, the daily newspaper Walfadjri reported on Thursday. Meanwhile in Mali, residents are being urged to dig pits so the young larvae fall into holes where they can be burnt. Local radio stations are also encouraging people to beat the insects with sticks or stamp on them with bare feet. "It's getting much worse here," Sakada Diakite, who runs the Malian Locust Fighting Programme, told IRIN from the capital Bamako. "We have many bands of young locusts spread across the whole northern region of our country." "For now, there's no significant damage on the food front, but we're starting to see the initial warnings signs," he added, noting that rice and millet crops would be most at risk. Resources to fight the locusts are the main problem. Diakite said the sole helicopter assigned to Mali's locust programme's had only taken to the skies on Thursday to start spraying crops from the air. Around 24 locust-fighting teams were spraying on the ground from vehicles, backed up by a further four teams sent from Algeria, which has had painful first-hand experience of locusts in recent months, he added. Could be worse than last plague Earlier this month, Jacques Diouf, the director general of FAO, warned during a visit Dakar that the current invasion of desert locusts could be worse than the last plague of 1987-89, which cost the international community $600 million and took five years to bring under control. Clive Elliott, one of the people spearheading the FAO's locust battle, said all the signs of impending disaster were present in West Africa. "Our people in the fields say that the number of locusts they're seeing now is greater than at the equivalent stage of the last plague," he told IRIN from Rome. "But the better news is that this time only the western Africa region is infested, whereas in the 1980s, countries around the Red Sea were affected as well." That is cold comfort for the people of West Africa, who produced record harvests last year after exceptionally good rains, but who risk seeing this year's crop eaten within hours in front of their very eyes by billions of voracious insects..

Locust swarms have been spotted across several West Africa countries

Locust swarms have been reported in Niger, Burkina Faso, the Cape Verde Islands, Senegal and as far east as Chad. The FAO said on Thursday that they had not reached the troubled Darfur region of western Sudan, although there was still a "moderate risk" that they would do so. It warned that the situation could get worse throughout West Africa in September when new swarms of insects bred in the region over the past two months start to form "The main effort should be now to protect as much as possible of the next harvest, which is crucial for the food security situation of millions of people in the region," the FAO said. Senegal's Agriculture Ministry said on Thursday that Dakar would be hosting a crisis meeting on 31 August for 13 West African countries at risk from the locust swarms.