Locust swarms put millions at risk of hunger
A multi-perspective look at the desert locust swarms destroying crops in East Africa and beyond.
In a nutshell
Tens of millions of people are at risk of starvation in East Africa due to swarms of desert locusts decimating crops. Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are the most affected countries in East Africa, but recent news reports show locust swarms are now also affecting countries in South Asia and the Middle East.
Image credit: Ben Curtis/AP
What is a locust?
According to Forbes, locusts are a ‘special type of grasshopper,’ that live in Africa, Central America, South America and Australia. Locusts are usually solitary creatures that act like regular grasshoppers.
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However, BBC News reports that when their environment changes and they become crowded together, they undergo a ‘Jekyll and Hyde transformation,’ going from shy, solitary creatures to gregarious. They become faster, hungrier, more sociable and reproduce explosively.
This specifically happens in areas of drought that have experienced heavy rainfall and where green vegetation has bloomed.
According to National Geographic, the lifespan of a desert locust is about three months. Under favourable conditions, locusts can reproduce and form a new generation up to 20 times larger than the previous one, increasing their population size exponentially over successive generations.
Why are the locust swarms a problem?
These ravenous swarms are vast and difficult to control, with each swarm containing up to 10 billion locusts and stretching over hundreds of kilometres, according to BBC News.
Image credit: Guilia Paravicini/Reuters
World Economic Forum reports that locust swarms are fast and ravenously hungry, flying up to 93 miles and eating the same amount of food as 35,000 people in one day.
In relative terms, this means a swarm of locusts the size of Paris could eat the same amount of food as half the population of France per day, reports the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
The locust swarms are affecting the horn of East Africa, an area that is already categorised by extreme food insecurity due to conflict, weather extremes, displacement and economic shocks.
Without effective intervention, the FAO predicts up to 50-70% of the cereal harvest could be lost, meaning vulnerable communities lose vast proportions of their livelihoods and their food source.
Image credit: Ben Curtis/AP
PANA Press reports that Oxfam warned millions who are already struggling from floods and the effects of the coronavirus could experience hunger when the new swarms of locusts hatch just as crops are to be harvested.
According to The Sun, ‘plagues of locusts have been documented devastating civilisations as far back as Ancient Egypt,’ however, there has not been a locust crisis of these proportions for 75 years.
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The key to controlling the locust swarms is to kill them before they reproduce and move to devastate other areas. East African nations have organised efforts to aerial spray pesticides to cover mass areas. However, allAfrica quotes Cyril Ferrand, FAO’s Resilience Team Leader for East Africa, as saying, ‘The biggest challenge we are facing at the moment is the supply of pesticides and we have delays because global freight has been reduced significantly,’ due to the coronavirus pandemic. This has impacted the speed of the response.
BBC News reports that a new generation of swarms have already migrated to other parts of the world to attack vegetation in the Middle East, Pakistan and India and may become a threat to parts of Central and West Africa.
Image credit: FAO via BBC News
Albert Lemasulani, a herdsman from northern Kenya who helps track the locust swarms, says, ‘Every day, you get five, six, seven, 10 swarms. If this continues, we will be done. Our life will be done.’
Image credit: BBC News
allAfrica reports that forecasts from the Global Report on Food Crises show 25 million people will experience acute hunger in Eastern Africa in 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic will further undermine food security in the region.
Where did the locust swarms come from?
National Geographic reports that the recent outbreak of locusts can be traced back to an unusual weather pattern in 2018 when two cyclones occurred in the Arabian Peninsula, followed by heavy rainfall.
‘These two 2018 cyclones enabled three generations of wildly successful locust breeding in just nine months, increasing the number of insects buzzing over the Arabian desert roughly 8,000 fold.’
Image credit: NASA Worldview
According to National Geographic, ‘Desert locusts, despite their name, thrive following periods of heavy rainfall that trigger blooms of vegetation across their normally arid habitats in Africa and the Middle East.’ It argues that unusual weather patterns caused by climate change may be to blame for the outbreak.
This, combined with further heavy rainfall, and a delayed start to spraying due freight delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, has exacerbated an already bleak food security situation in many countries, especially in East Africa, suggests BBC News.
Image credit: Giulia Paravicini/Reuters
Wired argues, if nations ‘can’t detect and obliterate the locust plague early, it will grow and grow, really only stopping when the swarm runs out of food.’
Are locust swarms a continued threat?
According to National Geographic, while ‘A confluence of unusual weather and climate conditions have helped stoke the outbreak… Recent research suggests this pattern could become more common in a warming world.’
While Wired argues that resilient locusts, ‘highly adapted to a life of heat and drought’ may have an advantage. ‘While other species struggle to adapt to a rapidly warming planet, the locusts will have an advantage both in their heat-tolerant physiology and potentially from a decrease in competition from less fortunate insects.’