Government abandons idea of using planes to fight locusts

Guinea-Bissau has dropped plans to use aircraft to spray swarms of locusts which have invaded the small West African country since most of the insects are concentrated in heavily populated and densely forested areas, the local representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said. Because of concerns over the possible adverse effect on people and on the delicate forest ecosystem of spraying pesticides by air, the government instead has decided to control the locusts from the ground, using specially equipped trucks borrowed from neighbouring Senegal, Rui Fonseca told IRIN. However, no trucks or pesticide from Senegal have arrived yet to deal with the insects, which can eat their own weight of vegetation each day. So almost a month after the 19 December arrival of the first swarms in Guinea-Bissau, control operations have yet to begin. Marcelino Martins, the Director of Agriculture at the Ministry of Agriculture, told Radio Bombolom, a private radio station in Bissau, that the government had no spraying equipment or pesticides of its own to use against the swarms of immature pink locusts that threaten the country's food crops and fruit trees. The government is particularly concerned about possible damage to this year's harvest of cashew nuts. Cashews are Guinea-Bissau's main export and the principal source of cash income for two thirds of its peasant farmers. The locust invasion from Senegal comes as cashew nut trees are flowering and are particularly susceptible to damage. Government officials said on Thursday that 700 hectares of cashew nut plantations were infested with locusts in Biombo district, one of the country's main cashew producing areas. Guinea-Bissau exported 93,000 tonnes of cashew nuts last year which earned the former Portuguese colony US$61 million in foreign exchange. The crop is vital as a source of cash income, and indirectly as food, for the country's peasant farmers. They sell the raw nuts to traders for up to 400 CFA francs (80 US cents) per kg, but often they simply barter a 50 kg bag of cashew nuts directly for a 50 kg of rice, the staple food of Guinea-Bissau's 1.3 million population. Mango and orange trees and food crops have also been ravaged by the biggest locust invasion of the country in living memory. Sambaro Cande, a farmer in in the village of Bantanjam near the Senegalese frontier, told IRIN his fields of cassava had been devastated. "The cassava was supposed to feed my family of 40 people for six months, but all three of my fields have been hit and I am afraid we are going to go hungry," he said. The semi-arid Sahel belt of West Africa suffered its worst locust invasion for 15 years in 2004, but most of the swarms moved north across the Sahara in November to their winter feeding and breeding grounds in North Africa. However, some swarms were blown south. They eventually reached southern Senegal, where there have not so far been reports of serious crop damage, Guinea-Bissau, and some northern districts of Guinea-Conakry.