Mitigating the Desert Locust Infestation amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
29 April 2019 - While most of the world is battling with the coronavirus pandemic, swarms of desert locusts are infesting significant parts of Eastern Africa and Southern Asia. To share an overview of the locust growing challenge, FAO North America and CSIS convened an online event featuring experts from FAO, USAID, the One Acre Fund and the Regional Desert Locust Alliance.
“The World Food Programme recently projected that COVID-19 will double the number of people at risk of extreme huger from 130 million to 265 million by the end of the year,” said Caitlin Welsh, Director of the Global Food Security Program at CSIS, who moderated the session. “Many of the people most at risk are living where desert locusts threaten to devastate crops and agricultural livelihoods.”
Vimlendra Sharan, Director of FAO North America, put the scale of the problem into perspective explaining that the average lifecycle of the locusts is three months. “For every single female locust there are about 20 locusts in the new generation. It’s an exponential increase – so after 3 months you have 20 squared, which is about 400 times more,” explained Sharan.
“In Eastern Africa, where the locust outbreak is strongest, 27 million people in 6 countries were suffering from acute food insecurity, pre-COVID-19 and pre-desert locust outbreaks,” said Dominique Burgeon, Director of the Emergency and Rehabilitation Division at FAO during his keynote address, referencing the 2020 Global Report on Food Crises. “East Africa is a real hotspot in terms of food insecurity.”
The desert locusts emerged in the “Empty Quarter,” a remote region in the Arabian Peninsula in mid-2018, where breeding had been going on for 9 months. “By early 2019, the desert locusts started moving in several directions, first towards Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iran. In Yemen, relatively good conditions allowed another cycle of breeding, and by summer 2019, they moved to Ethiopia and Northern Somalia,” explained Burgeon. While the desert locust populations would normally regulate their numbers during the hot season, a massive cyclone (Cyclone Taiwan) that hit the region in late 2019 created ideal wet conditions allowing a new cycle of locusts to invade Ethiopia and Kenya in huge numbers, unseen in 70 years for Kenya, and 25 years for Ethiopia.
“The current situation in Eastern Africa remains extremely alarming, as swarms continue to mature,” stressed Burgeon. “Large quantities of water in March across East Africa has created conditions for continued breeding. Despite the fact that there have been increasingly important control operations that have taken place, the threat to food security remains very high,” he added. This is largely because the current breeding will lead to a new generation of immature locusts towards June and July, coinciding with the harvest season, putting at risk food production and livestock in the region.
FAO’s approach to addressing the current desert locust upsurge, based on recommendations from the 2003-05 desert locust outbreak in the Sahel, combines control operations with efforts to safeguard the livelihoods of farmers, pastoralists and livestock through cash interventions, inputs, animal feed and veterinary support. Burgeon noted that FAO is augmenting the capacity of affected governments to respond to the situation by tracking swarms through surveillance; carrying out aerial and on-the-ground control measures; and conducting assessments on the impacts. Using a variety of suppliers across the world has enabled FAO to keep the flow of inputs and equipment going, despite restrictions caused by COVID-19. FAO has appealed to the international community for US$153 million USD to support these ongoing efforts.
“Restriction in movements due to COVID-19 has reduced some farmers’ access to markets for small vegetable crops, reducing their income stream, at a time when farmers need to be saving for potential risks, such as locusts,” said Stephanie Hanson, Senior Vice President, One Acre Fund. The Organization is working with 400,000 small-scale farmers in Kenya, and is monitoring how locusts are affecting their farms. “We have a network of a thousand field staff in Kenya, and we are using that network to track locustsightings, and if we have enough field reports, we send teams out to conduct ground spraying of locust hopper bands. We have been doing this work in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture in Keyna,” outlined Hanson. Farmers can mitigate the risk of the current infestation by reducing how much they are spending on seed and fertilizers.
“The locust outbreak is an urgent concern for USAID. Thusfar we have provided nearly US$20 million to FAO for humanitarian assistance to support regional efforts to control locusts, especially in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia,” said Matt Nims, Deputy Director of USAID’s Office of Food for Peace. He shared that the funds are not only going towards surveillance detection, ground-based and aerial control operations, but for training on the safe use of pesticides equipment, radio GPS training, locust tablets on vehicles, and aircrafts, in collaboration with FAO, and in conjunction with local and national governments.
A group of NGOs operating in the Greater Horn of Africa launched the Regional Desert Locust Alliance in February out of concern over gaps in the response to the desert locust crisis, particularly in terms of food security and livelihoods, shared Steven Burak, Project Development Manager for the Horn of Africa, ACTED, and Coordinator of the Alliance. The Alliance now has 30 NGOs working in eight countries in the region. “Beyond advocacy, what we are trying to ensure for the NGO community, the wider humanitarian community, as well as governments at a national, local and regional level, is that our approaches are well coordinated,” said Burak. “This is a new crisis layered on top of a number of other crises we see on a year-on-year basis across the region from conflicts, floods, and the wider effects of climate change.”
A robust Q & A session followed the speakers’ interventions and highlighted how stakeholders are working to ensure coordinated action to curb the spread of the locusts and support communities most at risk from the impacts of the locust infestation.