Villagers stare hunger in the face after locust invasion

Sadjo Hamdy has just two precious cows left. Once he had a dozen, but several years of drought followed by a plague of locusts have destroyed his sorghum crop and grazing land. With his grain stores empty, and eight lean months to go before the start of the next harvest in September, Hamdy is considering selling another cow so that he can buy food to feed his hungry family. Hamdy lives in Bouchamo, a poor dusty village in southern Mauritania, 10 km from the river that marks the border with Senegal. Here, some 500 families, clustered in mud houses, survive on a finely balanced blend of crop growing and livestock herding. But the large fields of sorghum, rice and peas that the men of Bouchamo planted around the village last year were stripped bare by the locusts. The swarms of grasshopper-like insects which infested much of Mauritania from June until November, also munched their through the sparse vegetation of the semi-arid region. Hamdy and his neighbours had been hoping to use that to graze their cattle on. “Selling animals is a last option, but now it has come to this… even though when everyone is tired, when every one is hungry, I know the price will not be good,” the wiry 70-year-old man told IRIN. “I used to have more than 10 cattle and some fields on the edge of the village with good crops, but that was six years ago,” Hamdy said as he squinted against the sand-filled desert wind. “Things were good then.” Disaster could strike within a few months But recurrent drought has made life very tough for the rural population of southern Mauritania, forcing many of them to drift to the slums that ring the capital Nouakchott and the country's other main towns. Then last year, when much of Mauritania did enjoy good rain, swarms of locusts drifted in like dark clouds, devouring every scrap of greenery in their path. The World Food Programme (WFP) has warned of an impending humanitarian disaster in southern Mauritania. Last month it appealed for US$31 million to feed 400,000 impoverished people whose crops and grazing land was destroyed in the 2004 locust invasions. The estimated bill for this massive feeding operation has since risen to $40 million. Although 40 percent of the money requested has already been promised, those commitments have yet to be honoured and food stocks in Mauritania are running low. “We could face disaster in the next few months as our existing supplies will not last beyond April. We urge the international community to take our appeal seriously. It is very sad to see people having to sell the few assets they have,” said Sory Ouane, the WFP country director in Mauritania. The government of this mainly desert state which forms a bridge between black Africa and the Arab world, reckons even more food aid will be needed. It estimated in November that 900,000 people - nearly a third of Mauritania's 2.8 million population - would go hungry in 2005. Goats and cattle gather around the deep well in Bouchamo where women work furiously pulling buckets out of its depths. But these animals no longer belong to the villagers themselves. They belong to some town folk who can afford to pay the destitute herders who no longer have animals of their own to lead them out across the sparse grazing land. “I can’t afford to send my two cows out with a herder,” explains Hamdy with a wave of his arm. “I have them taken out into the bush in the morning and they have to wander back on their own by nightfall.” As a result, his beasts are getting more bony.

Last year's locusts have left this year's storeroom empty

The women in Bouchamo each tend a small vegetable garden where they grow more delicate produce - a few tomatoes, onions and carrots. An empty store room Fatimitu Mint Eletou, is 45 but looks older - her skin darkened and wrinkled by the hard sun. Every day she has been working on her garden, which is just starting to look green again after being wiped out by a passing swarm of locusts in October. However, Eletou's hard work won’t make up for the loss of last year’s crop. Her storeroom is virtually empty and she doesn’t know what the family will be eating soon. “It should be full like this with millet,” said Eletou, waving a hand high above her head to show the imagined mound of grain. “But I haven’t seen it like that for three years now.” The dark mud-walled room is four feet wide and six feet long. In a corner there are about 20 cabbages - already withered and blackening in the heat - a small sack of maize and some firewood. This storeroom ought to be filled with enough food to last Eletou and her family for the next eight months. The hungry season started in January this year, three months earlier than usual. If the rains come, there could be a first harvest in July or August, but recent patterns of rainfall indicate a new crop won’t be harvested until September. The WFP's relief efforts will concentrate on three provinces in southwestern Mauritania; Trarza, Brakna and Gorgol. Here two years of crippling drought, followed by last year’s locust plague have destroyed traditional coping mechanisms. Tens of thousands of people have been left close to starvation by the voracious insects which can eat their own weight of food every day. Nothing left to sell “What can I sell? I have nothing!” Eletou implores. She and her husband have no livestock. They do have two donkeys, but Eletou wants to hold on to those. Sometimes, she said, her husband is able to hire them out for fetching and carrying heavy loads. “We are hungry!” chimes in a friend. “Look at Fatimitu, look how thin she has become!” she says, pulling at her friend’s clothes. “And me too! Look!” the friend added, pulling her black flowing robes tight around her waist to outline her slender body. “We are only eating one meal a day,” explained Eletou. “When there is not enough food, it is the young and the old that get fed first.” She has 10 children, five of whom still live at home. She also has an ailing 87-year-old mother to care for. The women of Bouchamo have resorted to feeding their families on tiny ‘guijili’ berries that grow wild in the bush. These are boiled and mashed into a paste. But the women have to walk up to seven kilometres to gather enough berries for a meal and as all the trees closest to the village have been stripped, they have to walk further each day to find enough of them. In some areas relief efforts have already begun. In another small nameless settlement, well to the north of Bouchamo and closer to the Sahara desert, Teslem Mint Berrouh’s five-month-old twins have developed malnutrition. No breast milk to feed the twins Berrouh said she could no longer produce milk for them because she herself was only eating two meagre meals a day. “My husband and I are farmers. But this year, there were two big problems - first the rains have been bad and then the locusts destroyed everything we had worked for, leaving us with nothing to eat,” she said.

Berrouh cannot produce breast milk and her twins are suffering from malnutrition

The family, which lives in a tent by the 300 km milestone on the main road from Nouakchott to southeastern Mauritania had no animals to sell. The few goats they once had did not survive the droughts of 2002 and 2003. But Berrouh did have some jewellery. “I sold some earrings and a necklace that I got for my wedding so that I could buy food. It was all I had,” she said. The rains in 2004 were good. Berrouh and thousands like her thought that they had turned the corner. Better times seemed to lie ahead. But then the flying swarms of locusts came and ate their first good crop in years. “Locusts are like people, they depend on water and vegetation too,” explained Ould Mohamed Sid’Ahmed, an entomologist with the government's Centre for Locust Control. “So when the good rains came in 2003 they hatched many locusts eggs leading to the most serious invasion seen in Mauritania since 1988,” he added. Life-saving food, but only for the very young As a result, Berrouh leaves her tent twice a day to walk the short distance through the dusty scrub to a WFP feeding centre, one of several dozen that have already sprung up in Brakna province. There her three youngest children can claim a free meal. The local semi-nomadic population has spread out through the area in a bid to find more food. They forage in the bush to find food for themselves and fodder for their animals - if they have any. The feeding centre hands out helpings of vitamin-enriched corn soya blend porridge to 27 children identified by local aid organisations as extremely vulnerable.

Hungry children gobble up the porridge

Volunteers cook up the gruel, which the kids drink from plastic cups under the shade of the feeding centre tent. “If the twins did not have the porridge they would be totally ill," said Berrouh, 36, who has a total of six children. "But not having enough food is a problem for all of the family, not just the youngest." Berrouh also cares for her aging parents and mother-in-law - aged between 70 and 95 and already weakening with hunger. Although once a month the WFP centre gives her a supplementary ration of rice, oil and beans, it is not enough to feed her family properly. WFP want to extend the feeding programme so that Berrouh and all her family can receive more substantial rations, but funds need to be secured first. Locusts are likely to come back WFP and the government are already warning that when this year's rains come the swarms of locusts are likely to re-emerge too, unless a well-co-ordinated spraying campaign can be mounted to break their breeding cycle. “Our campaigns start every year with the rains,” explained Sid’Ahmed. “If the rains don’t come then there will be no locusts. It is entirely dependent on climatic conditions - the more rain there is, the more locusts there could be,” he said. “Although the rains last year were not good enough for southwestern Mauritania to have been used as a breeding ground, the eastern part of the country did get good rains. If we see locust invasions again, that’s where they will be starting from,” he said. Locusts can fly over 100 kilometres a day and can strip trees, bushes and fields of all greenery within hours. Last year the governments of the Sahel countries were slow to react and donors ignored pleas by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for money to buy pesticide and hire planes to spray the swarms of locusts before they started breeding out of control By the time they finally swung into action the bill for locust control had rocketed from US$6 million to $100 million and many of the spray teams only swung into action as the locusts began their annual migration back across the Sahara desert to their winter feeding grounds in North Africa. “It is important to act in time so that the locusts do not have time to multiply. We hope that the international community has learned its lesson,” Ouane, the head of WFP in Mauritania, said.