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In Africa, locust plagues began ravaging Djibouti and Eritrea in January 2020 and are now spreading to Tanzania and Uganda, threatening food security and the livelihoods of millions. With the most devastating destructive power in decades, these swarms devour grasslands and crops within hours of their appearance.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has appealed to the international community for $76 million to help governments rapidly expand insecticide spraying and other control measures against locusts. If left unchecked, the situation could threaten food security for 13 million people.
David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), said the organization will provide funding to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to combat the locust plague in East Africa. "If we don't act now, the WFP will need 15 times that amount – more than $1 billion – to support people suffering from hunger due to crop failures and loss of livelihoods," Beasley said.
The locust infestation in East Africa is currently the worst in 25 years.
In mid-February, several nutrition and food security experts in Africa began warning of the spread of this plague. Desert locusts were multiplying exponentially across Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and large swarms had been seen in Eritrea, Djibouti, and northeastern Uganda. If not controlled promptly, the FAO estimated that the locust population could increase 500-fold by June and spread to South Sudan, wreaking a food disaster in one of the world's poorest regions.
At least 700 hectares of crops have been destroyed, severely threatening food security in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya.
In Kenya, a swarm of locusts estimated to number nearly 200 billion is covering an area of approximately 2,400 square kilometers.
Swarms of locusts, estimated to number in the hundreds of millions, are moving between East African countries at speeds of up to 130 km/day.
Currently, several countries in West Asia and South Asia are also concerned about a rare locust plague. The cause has been identified as favorable weather conditions such as heavy rainfall and prolonged monsoon winds, which allow locusts to easily breed and spread.
According to Zhang Zehua, a plant protection expert from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the border areas between the Tibet Autonomous Region (China) and Pakistan, India, or Nepal are considered the most vulnerable to locust outbreaks in Asia in the near future because these are areas where desert locusts breed and thrive.
However, due to environmental, climatic, and food resource limitations, desert locusts are unlikely to continue their invasion deep into China because their migration routes would be blocked by the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
Locusts devastate crops wherever they land and pose a serious threat to aviation security.
According to National Geographic, at each landing site, a medium-sized locust swarm can devastate 192 million kilograms of crops – equivalent to the amount of produce consumed by the entire population of Kenya; a swarm the size of Paris could devour as much food as half the population of France. With the current locust population in Kenya, they could consume in a single day the same amount of food that the residents of three US states – New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York – combined, enough to feed 2,500 people for a year.
