Government calls for massive food aid after locust invasion

Mauritania, the country hardest hit by West Africa's worst locust invasion for 15 years, has appealed for 246,000 tonnes of emergency food aid for destitute villagers and their starving animals, a senior agriculture official told IRIN on Thursday. Earlier this month, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned that up to 50 percent of Mauritania's cereal production might be lost after swarms of locusts devoured their way through crops in the poor and mainly desert country. Hmalla Moma, the government's Director of Agriculture, told IRIN on Thursday that Mauritania faced a grain deficit of nearly 190,000 tonnes during the year ahead. He said the government had called on the international community to urgently provide 84,000 tonnes of grain and 27,000 tonnes of other food products to help feed the country's 2.8 million human population. "We have been invaded by locusts for the best part of the year and on top of that the rains have not been good," Moma said by telephone from the capital, Nouakchott. "It's a lethal cocktail... a situation that one can definitely characterise as catastrophic." But it is not just people that risk going hungry. The 17 million camels, cows, sheep and goats, which many nomadic Mauritanians depend on for their livelihood, are also under threat. Agricultural experts say much of the sparse desert pasture has been picked clean by the voracious grasshopper-like insects aswell, leaving nomadic herdsmen desperately short of grazing land for their animals. "There was not much good pasture because of the bad rains and much of what there was has been damaged," Moma said. "So we are asking for 135,000 tonnes of animal feed as well," he added. FAO officials said the Mauritanian government had formally launched the appeal for food aid at a meeting with foreign diplomats in Nouakchott on Wednesday. According to the director of Mauritania's locust control campaign, Mohamed Abdallahi Ould Babah, around 1.6 million hectares of land were infested with the locusts at the height of the crisis in August. The locusts, which can eat their own weight in food each day, invaded the entire country. Not even the turf of the national football pitch in Nouakchott was spared as swarms repeatedly descended on the capital. Residents tried in vain to burn rubbish, tyres and dead leaves to create smoke that would drive the bright yellow insects away. Some farmers criticised the government for not doing more to control the pests. On a three-day trip to the heavily infested south of Mauritania in September, an IRIN correspondent did not see a single locust control team sent out by the government. The locust control programme only moved into top gear in October when western donors rushed in more spray planes and insecticide and neighbouring Senegal sent some of its own ground control teams to operate on the Mauritanian side of the border. Although most of the swarms have now moved north into the Sahara desert, away from the crop growing areas of southern Mauritania, the locusts have not disappeared entirely. "We still have some swarms in the south-east," Ould Babah, Mauritania's chief locust fighter, told IRIN.