The desert locust, the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) says, is arguably the most destructive agricultural pest globally.
Scientifically known as Schistocerca gregaria (Forskal), the pest has been a pain for many eastern African nations during 2019 and 2020. Changing weather has created favourable conditions enabling the desert locust to rapidly reproduce and migrate.
The pest has been spreading through the Horn of Africa, East Africa, Arabian Peninsula, South West Asia and West Africa risking the livelihoods of millions in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania. People in these regions have faced acute food insecurity in 2020 due to the desert locust plague.
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To ensure that the challenge does not get out of hand, stakeholders including governments and scientists, among others, have come up with different initiatives aimed at limiting the spread of the pests.
One of these is the use of drones to complement traditional desert locust management measures. To ensure optimum success, Standard Operating Procedures are being developed for best use of technology. In Kenya, where the use of drones is being trialled, the outcome will determine if the initiative will be scaled to other affected African countries.
Last November, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) cautioned that the desert locust crisis could re-escalate as strong winds carried mature swarms from southern Somalia into eastern and north–eastern Kenya. FAO notes that a resurgence of the swarms could aggravate food security in the region with almost 25 million people already suffering from severe acute food insecurity.
In Somalia, focus is on areas of high risk with FAO supporting authorities to scale up anti-locust measures.
Survey and control operations on the ground and by air have been scaled-up with resources including aircrafts, vehicles, equipment, bio–pesticides, insect growth regulators and strategically positioned staff in various parts of the country.
To ensure that the most at risk are cushioned, FAO and its partners are providing farmers in affected areas with supplies to not only assist food-insecure households but also planting and replanting packages to ensure that the farmers can ascertain that their land is planted after the pest has been destroyed.
All along, the desert locust is not all that the farmers have had to deal with in Kenya. There is also the issue of the fall armyworm (FAW) which has threatened the maize crop in the nation which has become a net importer of the staple every dry season.
For a long time, FAW posed a significant threat to the maize crop in Latin America but the pests’ sudden appearance in Africa in 2016 led to a rapid spread that resulted in enormous crop losses. The armyworm devastated maize crop in all the maize producing areas of Kenya in 2017 and 2018.
Countries most affected by the FAW are Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania whose maize harvests—the most important staple food crop, not only in the East African region but across the entire continent—are at risk.
CABI says that the FAW is estimated to cause 8-20 million tonnes of maize losses each year and due to little knowledge of the pest and ways of managing it, the impacts can be catastrophic.
To fight the pest, CABI with partners have developed an emergency response strategy empowering local communities of six target countries to effectively manage and monitor outbreaks in their respective localities, helping to prevent further spread. CABI’s campaign involves Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda in addition to Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania which were the trial countries for the elimination of the armyworm.
In the three East African countries where the FAW was widespread, CABI notes that there was a reasonable level of biological control in place. To further suppress the FAW, augmentative biological control can be implemented.
While the pests affect farmers’ livelihoods, the economic effects go much further and affect the entire food chain. With maize being the staple in Africa, farmers will have lost on the costs of purchasing and planting the seeds which includes hiring labour. If the fall armyworm continues, the long-term effect is that farmers will shift from the crop denying those who benefit from the crop an earning opportunity.
The desert locust, on the other hand, decimates all crops including pasture meaning the losses are widespread and the devastating effect is that all farmers are affected. This translates into the entire food chain being impacted since the food production factor has been destroyed by the pest.
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At the apex of this destruction by both pests is the fact that communities and governments have to supplement their citizens. Farmers have to dig deeper into their pockets to feed themselves and their livestock while also having to pay for wasted labour.
While the armyworm’s threat appears to have been slowed down somewhat, the desert locusts’ thriving has seemingly been enabled by several factors among them climate change.
The FAO cautions that the desert locust may have gained new momentum from Cyclone Gati which initially formed in the Indian Ocean on November 22, 2020, making landfall near Xaafuun and the northern tip of northeast Puntland.
For more than a year now, the desert locust upsurge has been the worst the region has faced in decades. Somalia has been the hardest hit.
FAO representative in Somalia Etienne Peterschmitt says that rains and winds are two of the most favourable conditions for desert locusts to multiply rapidly and spread to areas where they had hitherto been under control.
The cyclone has brought fresh rains and the prevailing winds and the immature swarms that were present in the difficult to access Sanaag highlands have matured and moved to Sool and Togdheer.
This means that East Africa is not out of the woods yet when it comes to the desert locust threatening rural food security and livelihoods.
FAO notes that the new invasion of desert locusts means that large areas of cropland and pasture are at risk of being damaged, with potentially severe consequences for agricultural, agropastoral and pastoral livelihoods in a context where food security is already fragile.
In addition, there is widespread breeding currently underway in eastern Ethiopia and central and southern Somalia. With weather conditions favouring breeding, coupled with the potential to expand to northern Somalia, the numerous immature swarms that would have matured by mid-December could mean the locust swarms could drift further south to southern Ethiopia and southern Somalia, most likely reaching northern Kenya.
The invasion is epic.
Unless this destruction is arrested in a timely way through the concerted efforts of all stakeholders, the effects could be devastating.
To understand the potential magnitude of the invasion, representatives from the European Union, Germany and Switzerland have visited various desert locust–affected areas to understand progress made so far in the fight against the pest.
As it is, the desert locust is proving to be a tough nut to crack even as the region continues fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.
