President calls for locust army as swarms descend on Dakar

West Africa should enlist the military to win the war on locusts, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said on Tuesday, as locust swarms reached the capital Dakar, swirling around in the sky like yellow snowflakes. Wade, who was hosting a meeting of agriculture and armed forces ministers from around West Africa, proposed four bases be set up in Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Senegal, to monitor and coordinate the fight against locusts, which are threatening to destroy the food crops of millions of subsistence farmers. "I'm particularly stressing the need for the army to be mobilised because for me this is a real war," Wade told the conference. The flying pests, which can eat their own weight in a day, hit Dakar on Tuesday, having travelled down from Mauritania and through the northern reaches of Senegal. Children, yelping that they had never seen anything like it, made impromptu attempts to kill the locusts, kicking and swiping at them with sticks. They stuffed the dead locusts into empty water bottles or dug holes in the ground to bury them. But thousands of litres of insecticide and piles of spraying equipment are needed if the swarms are not to develop into a full-scale plague, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says. Experts fear the mature yellow locusts will mate, lay eggs and give rise to a new generation of pink hoppers which could wreak havoc on fields of maize, millet, sorghum and rice right across the Sahel from Senegal to Chad. Last week, the FAO warned it had received just a third of the $100 million needed to keep the insects at bay but Wade told delegates at Tuesday's meeting that time and not money was the key factor. "I don't want to talk about money anymore. I want equipment, pesticides, hours in a plane," the president said. "If I'm given two million dollars, by the time I've invited bids for the work, the locusts will have munched their way right up to my palace." Wade said countries should pool resources, whether physical, financial or military, to beat back the locust invasion but on the sidelines of the conference deemed Senegal's plan too ambitious. "In my country, we're already having trouble getting together enough resources for a single plane," said a representative from one Sahelian country, who did not wish to be identified. "But the Senegalese are asking for 36 planes and 500 vehicles," he added. Representatives from Algeria, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, Tunisia, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso, Gambia, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt attended the locust brain-storming session in Dakar, which ran from Monday morning until Tuesday evening. The FAO director general Jacques Diouf warned on a visit to Dakar earlier this month 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.