Farmers are battling outbreaks that are ravaging the Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, Western Cape. (Photo by Wikus de Wet/AFP)
A Northern Cape sheep farmer is “too scared” to begin counting the cost of the damage unleashed by huge swarms of endemic brown locusts that devoured his grazing lands on his Richmond farm in little more than a day.
“The damage is immense,” said Barry Naude, who like his neighbours in the Hanover district, has already endured four years of hard, brutal drought, which was broken by the November rains. He told how the locust swarms that clouded the skies last week covered 5000ha or “about 10 000 rugby fields.
“They arrived in the morning and began settling and left the next day… The damage they did, what they’ve eaten in tons is difficult to estimate, but we’re back to square one. It looks as if it never rained with us,” the worried farmer said.
“We would have gone into winter with adequate food reserves but now that’s gone. We’ve been through four years of drought and none of us have financial reserves to feed. I’ve been told that it’s just the first wave coming through, that other swarms are still on their way. I presume that it’s just the beginning of our problem, not the end.”
Several days of aerial spraying had brought the massive swarms in the region under control, but Naude said more swarms had been observed crossing the provincial boundary and moving into Middelburg in the Eastern Cape.
‘In the middle of the storm’
Andrea Campher, the risk and disaster manager for AgriSA, said farmers in the Karoo belt of the Northern Cape, Eastern Cape and Western Cape, have been battling to control the infestations, by ground.
“I think this is one of the biggest outbreaks that we’ve seen in many, many years of locusts,” she said. “Some of the farmers have experienced years of drought conditions and now with the good rainfall, we’ve got these locust outbreaks… We are optimistic that we can fight this battle but we’re still in the middle of the storm.”
Swarms are being carried by wind to other provinces, Campher said. “We see now there’s an explosion of outbreaks especially in the Eastern Cape… Some of the swarms that have been reported are not less than 1 000ha and are up to 8 000ha… There are areas like Oudsthoorn, where they haven’t experienced a locust outbreak in more than 40 years, now with outbreaks and the challenge in these areas is that there are no district locust offices trained.”
Difficult terrain
The Karoo is difficult terrain, she said. “It’s not always possible to control everywhere and it’s useful now that we have helicopters mobilised because the ground teams [of district locust officers] don’t have the capacity anymore to control the outbreaks. They’ve been spending day and night to make sure these fliers do not end up in irrigation areas or even the croplands in the Free State or North West… because that will be chaos.”
The aerial support has been mobilised in a public-private partnership with the government and organised agriculture, she said. “We pay for the aircraft and the department of agriculture, land reform and rural development supplies the poison.”
However, pesticide stocks are now running low,” she said. “That’s just an additional risk… But the department has told us it is procuring more pesticides.”
Numerous problems
The Democratic Alliance party’s Noko Masipa, a member of the portfolio committee on agriculture, land reform and rural development, said on Friday that commandos and farmers were experiencing numerous challenges, including the delivery of protective clothing, late supply of prescribed toxic chemicals and late payments by the department.
“The DA is concerned that if personnel are not duly compensated, they might become demoralised and unable to function properly,” Masipa said.
Reggie Ngcobo, the spokesperson for the department, said it was working together with organised agriculture in the three provinces: “Since the outbreak last year, we’ve paid the farmers themselves and we’ve given them protective clothing, chemicals, because we believe they are better placed as they are the ones that are fighting locusts.
“Organised agriculture alerts us if there is a shortage of chemicals and we request the locust officers to go through the district offices, not the head office. There is still stock. After the rains, we expected they [locusts] will multiply but we are hopeful that the teams on the ground… are going to assist in the fight against the locust outbreak,” he added.
South Africa has experienced far worse outbreaks
The current large-scale locust outbreak is the biggest South Africa has recorded in a decade but is “nowhere near” the largest on record, said Dr Roger Price, the research team manager at the Agricultural Research Council’s plant health and protection unit. “It is dwarfed by the big outbreaks we had in the 1980s, the one in 1975 and the one in 1963.”
With the seasonal nature and unpredictable location of brown locust outbreaks, operational management has relied for decades on the “commando system”, an army of temporarily employed locust officers and spray-machine operators tracking down and controlling individual hopper bands or roosting swarm targets. These are usually farmers with previous experience with locust-control campaigns, who are reappointed during outbreaks.
They are contracted by the government, paid for their efforts and are supplied with insecticides and protective gear. “They gather together with a lot of enthusiasm and drive out to go and hunt the enemy. But they are being overwhelmed. I feel sorry for them because they are not really prepared. Also, there’s a lot of farms in the remote areas of the Karoo with no owners… so the reporting network just falls flat.”
Too many locusts survive, despite control
The commando system, he said, may have worked 20 to 40 years ago. “They just haven’t got the technology, the background and logistics to be able to do it properly so enough locusts escape being controlled to seed the next season. The guys do work extremely hard and kill billions and billions of locusts but too many survive to make it to the next season and that’s the problem.”
The government, he said, has done a reasonable job to keep locusts in the Karoo as “they aren’t flying over Joburg like they were in the 1930s”, Price quipped, “but the sheer cost of that to the taxpayer and the environmental consequences of spraying tens of thousands of hectares of poison is… collateral damage.”
The current outbreak is unlikely to pose a significant threat to food security, Price added, because the maize crop has already matured and wheat crops have yet to be planted. “It can damage certain crops along the Orange River, but it’s not a threat to food security at the moment.”
Declare a locust disaster – DA
The DA’s Masipa has now written to agriculture minister Thoko Didiza asking that she requests her counterpart, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs, to declare a locust disaster in the Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape and Free State, which have been severely affected by the locust plague, for the next three months, followed by a monthly review thereafter.
“Once these areas have been declared disaster areas, minister Didiza will be able to put together a budget and submit a requisition to the national treasury for funding to combat the locust outbreak. This will prevent the plague from spreading to neighbouring provinces.”
Naude, however, said he was not holding his breath. “Through the drought, I don’t know one farmer that got even one cent of drought aid. That money disappeared. The bottom line is we’re on our own.”
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