FAO eclipses regional locust control body, but comes in for criticism

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has led international efforts to fight locusts across Africa and the Middle East for over 50 years, acting as a link between donors and the affected countries. But this time around, as the insects demolish crops across a wide swathe of West Africa, there have been problems. Donors ranging from the United States to the European Union have privately criticised the FAO for doing too little too late to tackle the current crisis and have accused the organisation of not being properly geared up to deal with it. Locust swarms have been invading the crop lands of the Sahel from Senegal to Chad since the end of June. Yet it was only during the last week of September that the FAO sent an emergency coordinator to Dakar to supervise control efforts on the ground and there is no single authority coordinating the flexible use of planes and spray teams across frontiers in the region. The FAO has also eclipsed OCLALAV, a smaller organisation set up by West African governments that was widely credited with doing a good job during the last locust emergency in the region between 1987 and 1989. Many agricultural experts and aid coordinators from non-governmental organisations regret that OCLALAV, a regional body set up in 1965 to control locusts, birds and other crop pests across the Sahel, has been under-financed and allowed to decline. As a result, it is no longer able to carry out this sort of regional coordination properly. Based in Dakar, OCLALAV once had its own locust control teams operating from five regional centres across West Africa and is widely regarded as having proved effective in the past. But OCLALAV's very success in controlling locusts lulled West African governments into thinking the insects no longer presented a serious threat to agriculture in the region and that they would be better off tackling any problems that did arise themselves. So 15 years ago they divided up OCLALAV's planes and equipment between its member states and drastically reduced the organisation's budget. A victim of its own success "OCLALAV died as a result of its very success in the fight against locusts," Fakaba Diakite, the head of Mali's locust control campaign told IRIN. But Keith Cressman, a locust control officer with FAO in Rome, offered a different explanation. He told IRIN that regional organisations had simply gone out of style as a means of pest control in Africa because individual governments thought they could do the job more effectively themselves. He pointed out that the Desert Locust Control Organisation (DLCO) of East Africa had undergone a similar decline to OCLALAV. "Locust control has become nationalist rather than regionalist for some very good reasons," Cressman said. "It is very difficult to get authorisation to do cross border operations either by land or air."

FAO is spearheading the battle to stop the locust invasion

Cressman accused OCLALAV of not performing particularly well in the 1980s locust crisis, during which, he said, the FAO had also taken the lead role in coordination. But many on the ground at the forefront of the current fight against locusts disagree. Moussa Niang, who works for a Senegalese non-governmental organisation called the Union for Solidarity and Mutual Aid, is training peasant farmers in northern Senegal how to work with the government's locust control teams and how to avoid being affected by the pesticides sprayed on their land. He told IRIN in the village of Ndioum that back in the 1980s, OCLALAV reacted far more quickly to spray local infestations of locusts and their flightless larvae known as hoppers, than the Senegalese Ministry of Agriculture teams are doing today. He also said that OCLALAV would have been faster off the mark mustering teams in Senegal to help out neighbouring Mauritania, which has suffered the most serious locust infestation in West Africa. "In Africa, when your neighbour's house is burning, everybody helps to put out the fire," Niang said. But OCLALAV no longer has the resources. Mamadou Oury Diallo, the technical director of OCLALAV, bemoaned the fact that following a restructuring of the organisation in 1989, its four crop spraying planes, its fleet of four-wheel-drive trucks and its spraying equipment were shared out between the agriculture ministries of its 10 member states. From then on, he noted, OCLALAV simply became a toothless coordination body for Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Some member governments had now stopped paying their dues altogether. Sidelined from decisions Although the organisation is still widely regarded as a valuable source of knowledge and expertise in locust control in West Africa, it has been sidelined from the decision-making process in the current crisis and it not widely heeded. OCLALAV, for instance, favours distributing insecticide powder to farmers in sacks so that they can dust it directly onto concentrations of flightless locust larvae known as hopper bands in their own neighbourhood. Senegal still does this, but the FAO opposes the practise on environmental grounds, pointing out that it requires 12 kg of powder to treat one hectare, compared to just one litre of concentrated liquid insecticide which leaves fewer toxic chemicals in the soil and groundwater afterwards. Furthermore, the intensive application of insecticide powder can lead to health problems for those applying it if they lack the right protective gear. The downside is that the liquid insecticide must be applied by special locust control teams sent out by the government or by crop-spraying aircraft. If these fail to appear, the local community gets no help at all. And with all the control teams desperately over-stretched, that happens all too frequently. "We would give (insecticide) powder to the farmers to allow them to treat local infestations effectively and we would make sure that treatment was regional with swarms being followed from one country to another," OCLALAV's Diallo told IRIN in Dakar. But Cressman at the FAO said that while treating hopper bands in an individual village might save its crops, such piecemeal measures would not make much of a dent in the overall locust population of West Africa and control efforts should be focused on reducing that. "What people can do at a village level doesn't impact on the overall locust numbers very greatly, although it does protect their own crops," Cressman said. Vast breeding area He pointed out that the locust breeding area in West Africa was "half the size of the United States." "To try to stop the locusts breeding there is virtually impossible." Cressman said, stressing that it would probably take several years of control efforts to reduce the present locust population to a point where it no longer presented a significant threat to agriculture.

Locusts mating in Dakar

OCLALAV representatives are still invited to locust control coordination meetings, but these days its voice carries little weight and the organisation can't even afford to pay for a website on which to publish its monthly bulletins. "If we were given just a small proportion of the means appealed for to fight against locusts we would be able to eradicate the plague," Bassirou Diop, OCLALAV's finance director pleaded. But donor money these days goes to FAO instead. Geraldo Carreiro, a European Union representative in Dakar, said: "We chose to go through the FAO as it makes things easier for us in terms of administrative procedures and in terms of responding to the emergency, particularly since some states have issued appeals for funds that were not always justified." But that has not stopped the EU and other donors from criticising the FAO for moving too slowly. The UN organisation counters that donors simply failed to give it the resources needed to spray the rapidly multiplying swarms before they started to invade the Sahel from North Africa three months ago. Clive Elliott, the head of the FAO's locust control unit in Rome, pointed out that had donors responded to the FAO's advice to boost control efforts in October 2003, or responded to its appeal for $9 million in February, they would not have been asked for $100 million last month to respond to a problem that has now mushroomed out of control. "FAO has warned about this problem since October last year," Elliott told IRIN. "The problem was that the donors were slow to respond and when they did respond, they did not provide cash (immediately)." But did the FAO shout loud enough and make its voice heard in the right places? Some aid workers and agricultural experts have suggested that the FAO failed to galvanise the international community to confront the locust invasion in time because it is an organisation geared more towards long-term agricultural development than emergency response work. "President (Abdoulaye) Wade was right in saying that the purchase procedures of FAO are not always well adapted to the urgency of the fight against locusts," said Mbargou Lo, an agronomist at Senegal's Ministry of Agriculture. "It is only when a country is invaded that the organisation puts its purchase procedures into motion. It takes a long time to get operations started although once they getting going things are okay," he added. Regional coordination the key All the same, there is broad agreement amongst donors that strong regional coordination is essential for the fight against locusts and that so far this has been lacking. "This year's response in the field has been disparate and poorly coordinated," said Francois Batalaningaya, the regional emergency aid coordinator of the US-based charity World Vision. The locust swarms move freely from country to country, often covering more than 100 km in a day. Each swarm contains tens of millions of insects, each one capable of eating its own weight in vegetation every day.

A young Mauritanian farmer looks on as a locust swarm descends on his field

According to the Inter-State Committee to Fight Drought in the Sahel (CILSS) these highly mobile clouds of insects could devour up to 25 percent of this year's grain crop in the poor and semi-arid countries on the southern edge of the Sahara. Agricultural experts now say that in Mauritania and Mali the losses are likely to be much greater, creating the near certainty of food shortages and famine in the months to come. A regional approach to solving the problem is therefore essential, as Senegal has found to its cost. Although Senegal has dealt more effectively than most other governments with locusts invading its own territory, its control teams are powerless to prevent several new swarms drifting south across the Senegal river every day from Mauritania, where the infestation is most serious and where control efforts so far have been notoriously weak. USAID now hopes to remedy that problem by supplying six crop spraying aircraft which will operate freely across the borders between Mauritania, Senegal and Mali, wherever they are most needed. And Senegal has also recognised the need to hit the swarms harder in Mauritania by recently sending three of its own ground-based insecticide-spraying teams across the border to help out. But until now, such instances of cross-border cooperation have been rare. "To the regional threat of locusts knowing no frontier, the answer has to be regional," Herve Ludovic de Lys, the head of the UN Organisation for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) regional support office in Dakar, told IRIN. "But technical coordination to eradicate the locust plague at the regional level has not worked so far," he admitted. West African governments also criticised Diplomats and aid agency chiefs say the lack of coordination is partly the fault of governments in the region, many of which were slow to acknowledge the peril represented by the locust invasion and take emergency measures. James Wolfensohn acknowledged this in late September, when he told Reuters in Washington: "I personally think we should have been more aggressive on locusts and the world should have been, but I think African leaders should have too." Diplomats privately criticised Mali as one country which was slow to wake up to the emergency, although when it finally did so, President Amadou Toumani Toure gave a month of his own salary to the locust control campaign and ordered all his ministers to do likewise. Some also accused Niger of undue complacency, although Cressman defended its achievement in treating more than 100,000 hectares of locust infested land with pesticide. The priority now is not so much to raise money to confront the crisis - donors have in any case pledged less than half of the $100 million sought by the FAO and have disbursed only $15 million of actual cash.

More crop-spraying planes are desperately needed

It is about getting resources on the ground fast to spray the locusts and hopper bands with insecticide before they munch their way through the ripening crops that will be harvested in October and November. Not about money "I don't want to talk about money any more," President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal thundered at the end of August. "I want equipment, pesticides and flying hours for crop-spraying planes." These needs have not changed. Only last week, the FAO said it needed more crop-dusting planes and more pesticides fast and heavy transport aircraft to take supplies to where they are needed rapidly But even when all the necessary resources have been provided, local logistics often prove a problem. UN officials pointed out that by the end of September Mali had eight fixed-wing aircraft and one helicopter to deploy against the locusts. But these planes were grounded for much of the time because they lacked fuel and maintenance and because local stocks of pesticide had run out. And at Podor, in northern Senegal on Monday, an IRIN correspondent found a Moroccan pilot who said he had been idle for most of the past week because there were insufficient teams to hunt down the swarms and tell him where they were located so that he could go and spray them early in the morning before they took flight again. In view of the prevailing confusion, FAO had to work hard to persuade a meeting of West African agriculture ministers and military chiefs in Dakar in early September not to create a completely new regional coordination body to conduct the fight against locusts. The FAO locust group in Rome provides early warning of problems that are likely to arrive, tracks swarms once they appear and monitors their breeding. And within West Africa, the FAO runs a regional coordination body which following the decline of OCLALAV, was supposed to have taken on the job of supervising action on the ground. The Commission for Controlling Desert Locusts in the Western Region is an Algiers-based organisation which is generally known by its French acronym CLCPRO. Created in 2002, it groups four countries in North Africa - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya - and five of their poorer neighbours on the southern edge of the Sahara desert - Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger and Chad. All are permanently under threat from locusts. When swarms develop, they spend the winter in North Africa and fly south across the Sahara to the Sahel in summer before returning north again once the rainy season is over. The CLCPRO held a coordination meeting of member states in Algiers in August, after which the FAO issued a new appeal for aid, but otherwise the organisation has kept a low profile. Fast reaction from North Africa Elliott said however that the organisation's staff had been instrumental in persuading the four Arab states of North Africa to send spray planes and ground control teams to help out their beleaguered neighbours in the Sahel. The realisation that locusts now breeding out of control in the savannah lands of West Africa will eventually arrive back on their own doorstep stimulated the Maghreb states to be individually generous in sending extra spraying teams and crop-dusting planes to help out their southern neighbours. Indeed they responded two to three months before traditional Western donors woke up to the locust crisis. Cressman said those who criticise the FAO should be aware that its role is only to coordinate policy and action between governments. The UN organisation has no mandate to coordinate control measures on the ground, he stressed, acknowledging that the logistics problems involved were tremendous. "At the FAO, we are helping to coordinate assistance to these countries, but we are not actually coordinating the operations themselves," Cressman said. "We do not have much control over identifying the targets and communicating the information to the pilots of crop-spraying planes." A fourth organisation has also had a minor role to play in the current fight against locusts. Niamey-based CILSS last month produced the first regional estimate of likely crop damage from locusts and identified where food shortages were likely to be most acute over the coming year. This tentative forecast will be updated following a new survey to be conducted this month, in conjunction with the FAO and WFP, when the harvest gets into full swing. However, the main role of CILSS is to promote food security. Ahmadou Mohtar Konate, the head of CILSS's food crisis prevention unit, said the organisation had no pretensions to assume an operational role on the ground. Meanwhile, the locust crisis just gets bigger. Elliott predicted on Tuesday that the FAO would need more than the $100 million it has already sought from donors to get on top of the problem as the focus of the emergency switches over the coming months from the Sahel back to North Africa. "I think it will probably go beyond that because we have the possibility now that large numbers of swarms are going to move back to North Africa," he said. "The chances are that the infestations in this coming winter/spring season are going to be bigger than they were last time."