Morocco complained on Thursday that international aid to help it fight off a plague of locusts threatening its crops has fallen far short of what is needed.
Writing in the Aujourd’hui le Maroc newspaper, Agriculture Minister Mohand Laenser said the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) ”has recently spoken of €9-million euros to be devoted to the locust control campaign. It is a very low figure if our true needs are taken into account.”
Laenser said Morocco has already spent €80-million to try to block the invasion of the insects.
But he added that he is ”confident in the efficacity of the teams involved in the struggle” and claimed that ”the situation is at the moment under control”.
For its part the newspaper declared that ”the FAO is doing nothing to put a halt to the phenomenon” and has ”not only raised the alarm too late but when it came to action has been guilty of inadequacy”.
It said that the situation ”was the more worrying in that the larvae are in the full process of hatching, producing battalions of young, ready to attack”.
Morocco, it said, is being overrun.
Since June 30 on average 106 000 hectares a day have been infested, the central office for coordination of the struggle against the locusts reported earlier this week.
On Monday the FAO launched an appeal for international aid to resist ”a spectacular increase in the number of locusts [which] could threaten crops in coming months”.
It said the first swarms have left their breeding grounds in northwest Africa to head south, in particular to Mauritania, Mali and Senegal.
”Many more swarms are expected in these countries as well as in Niger and Chad in the coming weeks,” the agency said.
The last locust plague, a phenomenon that occurs when many swarms combine, lasted from 1987 to 1989 and caused what then amounted to about $300-million in damage.
A ton of the insatiable insects can devour enough food to feed 2 500 people, and the FAO warned that a dramatic increase in locusts could threaten production in a vast area from the Atlantic to western Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of people already are going hungry because of the Darfur conflict. — Sapa-AFP