Thursday July 23, 2020
Large swarms of desert locusts have been invading Kenya for weeks after having infested some 70,000 hectares (172974 acres) of land in Somalia which the FAO has termed the 'worst situation in 25 years' in the Horn of Africa. DAI KUROKAWA/EPA
Mogadishu (HOL) - The UK announced on Thursday that it would be contributing another £18 million (Over $22 million) to combat vast swarms of locusts have swept through East Africa since January.
The UK’s International Development Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan made the announcement during a visit to British company Micron Group, which supplies pesticide sprayers to the United Nation’s Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Desert locusts are an extremely dangerous migratory pest that can inflict mind-boggling damage in mere minutes. A small swarm (1 km2) can be made up of 80 million locusts and can consume the same amount of food in one day as roughly 35,000 people. A massive swarm can eat up to 1.8 million metric tons of green vegetation, enough to feed the population of Germany.
“Vulnerable communities are on the brink of starvation because of the biggest locust outbreak in decades, made worse by the coronavirus pandemic. But unless other countries also step up and act now, this crisis will spread and cause even more devastation.”4
The FAO estimates that the locust swarms that forced Somalia to declare a national emergency in February have grown 20 times larger since March. The FAO is warning that locusts may destroy 15%-25% of the crops in the upcoming Gu harvest, driving up food prices and accelerating consumer inflation in vulnerable economies.
The bulk of the money will go to the FAO’s emergency appeal to help to control the increase of locusts across the hardest-hit areas of East Africa, Yemen and South-West Asia. The rest of the funds, £1million (over $1.2 million) will go towards improving early warning and forecasting systems for desert locusts.
The British Ambassador to Somalia, Ben Fender, welcomed the relief.
“The outbreaks of desert locusts in Somalia and Somaliland are affecting some of the most vulnerable communities in the country, who are already having a very difficult year as a result of floods and COVID. We are working with FAO and the Somali government to scale up surveillance and control operations to combat the locusts and protect the harvests.”
Since the onset of the crisis, the FAO says it has successfully controlled over 600,000 hectares of land, saved 1.2m tons crops with a value of $372 million, and eradicated over 400 million locusts in 10 countries in East Africa.