Bettter coordination and reserve funds needed to fight locusts

International agricultural experts have warned that better coordination is required to tackle locusts in West Africa after governments in the region and international donors were caught off guard by last year's insect invasion. Meeting in Dakar from 11 to 13 January, they also concluded that reserve funds should be established so that in the event of a fresh emergency, control operations can get under way immediately before donor funding filters through. "Coordination is presently organised at both an international and regional level. But experience shows that it is necessary to complete this framework by establishing a mechanism for sub-regional coordination among the frontline states (Mauritania, Niger, Mali and Chad) and those where swarms do not normally form," the 200 agricultural experts and aid officials said in a final statement. The conference also said that last year's locust control campaign had "clearly shown the urgent need for the states affected to be able to mobilise resources easily and rapidly." The experts therefore suggested that "a national fund for fighting locusts should be established in each country that should be funded in the first instance by the national budget." The semi-arid Sahel belt of West Africa suffered its worst invasion of locusts for 15 years between June and November 2004. The insects caused serious damage to crops and pastureland in Mauritania and parts of Senegal, Mali and Niger. Aid officials say hundreds of thousands of people will go hungry over the coming year unless they receive food aid. Donors reacted too late to requests for emergency aid to deal effectively with the locust crisis, even though the UN Food and Agricuture Organisation (FAO) launched its first appeal for aid in February. And the coordination of cross-border operations was poor. "During the last invasion, the infestation was five times bigger in Mauritania than in Senegal, but that country only had six aircraft at its disposal, whereas Senegal had 20," Mbargou Lo, the director of vegetation protection at Senegal's Ministry of Agriculture, told IRIN on the sidelines of the conference. "The Americans created a tripartite commission (between Senegal, Mauritania and Mali) which attacked the swarms without worrying about which side of the frontier they were on and that really proved useful," he added. The experts did not specify which organisation should take the lead in regional coordination. Two already exist. One is OCLALAV, an inter-governmental organisation for locust control in West Africa, based in Dakar. However, the organisation's control equipment and operating bases were handed over to its member governments in 1989 and its effectiveness has since declined. OCLALAV is now just a small, under-funded early warning body with a handful of staff. The other existing locust control organisation in West Africa is the Commission for Fighting Desert Locusts in the Western Region (CLCPRO). This is an Algiers-based organisation set up by the FAO in 2000, but which never managed to coordinate action among its member states on the southern fringe of the Sahara. Michel Lecoq, the head of locust research at France's Internationational Centre for Agronomic Research (CIRAD), said the best solution would be to activate another embryonic organisation created by the FAO called EMPRES. The acronym stands for the Emergency Prevention System for Transboundary Animal and Plant Pests and Diseases. EMPRES is an early warning, research and rapid reaction organisation that already operates effectively against locusts in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula. However, FAO officials say it never received the necessary funding to set up in West Africa. "It is necessary to use EMPRES to resurrect a prevention mechanism which already exists, but which is not effective enough," Lecoq said. He told IRIN that EMPRES was designed to provide an early warning and rapid reaction capacity for Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya in North Africa and the Sahelian neighbours Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Senegal. "Everybody agrees that we need to relaunch the programme and several donors who a year or two ago were unwilling to invest a couple of million dollars in preventive measures now understand the importance of supporting this," Lecoq added. Sidi Ali Moumen, Algeria's Director of Vegetation Protection, agreed that CLCPRO had not performed as well as it should have done last year. Moumen, who chairs the CLCPRO, told IRIN that agricultural experts had seen the 2004 locust invasion coming, but his organisation had not taken sufficient preventive action and it had failed to make donors sufficiently aware of the degree to which the insect invasion could damage food security in the region. Lecoq of France's CIRAD, hammered home the need for an emergency reserve fund capable of kick starting locust control operations before donor funds to deal with a particular crisis are mobilised. "In order to deal with a situation where the existing means of control have been overwhelmed and ecological conditions are favourable (to locust breeding) we must put in place emergency plans backed by a reserve fund which will enable us to conduct control operations right at the beginning of the upsurge," he said. If these funds prove insufficient, we can then appeal to donors in an efficient manner." Jacques Diouf, the director general of the FAO admitted last year that his organisation had been slow in mobilising donors to deal with the locust invasion and that it needed a large emergency fund to deal with such breaking crises quickly and effectively. Most of the locusts in the Sahel countries migrated north to their winter breeding grounds in the Maghreb during November, although some swarms were blown southwards to Guinea-Bissau and southern Senegal. Agricultural experts fear a second locust invasion of the Sahel during the onset of the rainy season in the Sahel in June. However, the FAO said last week that it was still too early to say how large and dangerous this would be. "Only in March-April 2005 will it be possible to have clear indications on what scale breeding will occur (in North Africa) and on what scale the Sahel will be reinvaded in the summer," the Rome-based organisation said in a statement.