Donors are belatedly coughing up cash to fight locusts in West Africa, but agricultural experts warned on Monday that it will take two or three years to reduce the number of insects to the point where they no longer present a significant threat to agriculture.
Officials of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said nearly 40 crop-spraying planes have been deployed to kill the swarms of locusts that have invaded Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger and Chad since June.
These aircraft and dozens of ground-based control teams are fighting to save the annual harvest, which is under way throughout the region and is due to finish by the end of November. According to preliminary estimates, the locusts could destroy up to a quarter of the crops in these countries.
FAO officials and the representatives of European donors admitted on Monday that not enough has been done to control the largest locust invasion to hit West Africa for 15 years.
They said the swarms are already moving back to their winter breeding grounds in North Africa and a fresh locust-control campaign will be required over the winter and spring to reduce their numbers in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Even then, they warned, large numbers of the insects are still expected to head south to the Sahel again next summer.
“The current interventions will allow us to reduce numbers, but to be able to totally break the locust cycle, at least two intensive campaigns in the Sahel and Maghreb countries will be necessary,” said Said Ghaout, the director of Morocco’s locust-control centre, who is currently helping FAO operations in Senegal.
“This is not the end of the story,” agreed Edouard Tapsoba, the FAO representative in Senegal.
“The situation will likely last for two or three years,” he told reporters.
The FAO has appealed for $100-million to fight this year’s locust invasion of the Sahel, and FAO officials said on Monday that $43-million of donations has now been received and a further $25,5-million is in the pipeline.
But Jos van Aggelen, the Dutch ambassador to Senegal, speaking on behalf of the European Union, admitted that not all this money will be spent in the timeframe originally planned.
“The plague will continue next year as we did not react early enough this year,” he told a news conference in Dakar. “We have not won the battle against locusts this year, so it will be important to be better prepared for next year’s fight and the EU’s funds … will also be used for that,” he said.
An EU statement said the union and its member states have collectively and individually pledged €50-million towards locust-control operations in the Sahel in 2004 and 2005.
But FAO officials said a fresh aid appeal will be needed to help the Maghreb states fight the billions of locusts currently heading north across the Sahara desert towards the southern foothills of the Atlas mountains.
“The intensity of next year’s locust upsurge will depend on the interventions that take place in the Maghreb and ecological and climatic conditions,” said Morocco’s Ghaout.
“If the current climatic conditions persist in the summer reproduction zone of the Sahel and the winter/spring breeding area of the Maghreb, then numbers will grow and we will face an invasion for a period of two or three years,” he predicted.
Nearly half the crop-spraying aircraft in West Africa have been sent to Senegal, although the country that has suffered the most extensive infestation of locusts is neighbouring Mauritania.
The Senegalese government said on Monday that 18 crop-spraying planes are operating from its territory, although four of them are flying cross-border operations into Mauritania.
The FAO said there are only five crop sprayers based in Mauritania, even though the country has nearly three times as much locust-infected land as Senegal and more swarms are entering its territory every day as the locusts migrate north.
The FAO said a further 11 planes are deployed in Mali, two in Niger and two in Chad, although the Libyan planes sent to Chad cannot fly at present because the right type of fuel is not available.
Morocco last week sent two planes to the arid Cape Verde Islands, 450km west of Senegal, to combat swarms that had been driven west over the Atlantic Ocean.
“The swarms in the Sahel are migrating towards the north, but a good number of locusts are still in the Sahel, notably hopper bands that will fledge and migrate later,” Ghaout said. — Irin