$25 million buys many tens of thousands of tons of food aid as well as its air transport and onward trucking to people, generally in Africa, whose crops have failed.
How odd therefore that international community has failed to produce the remaining half of the $50 million that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has said is the minimum needed to stop further widespread crop destruction due to awesome locust swarms.
Scientists had been predicting since last fall that there would a marked increase in infestation this year in North and West Africa because breeding conditions for the insects looked to be optimum. Yet little attention was paid to confronting the gathering storm until it had already broken upon Mauritania. An appeal for funds so that the important breeding grounds in the lowlands of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains could be sprayed did not elicit sufficient money to undertake the job. By the time the swarms hit Mauritania, it was too late to stop them doing devastating damage not only to Mauritanian farms but also to greenery everywhere. It is estimated that 80 percent of the harvest has been destroyed and more than a million people are already at risk of starvation. In the capital Nouakchott the leaves from shady avenues of trees were stripped and residents saw their carefully tended vegetable plots devastated in minutes. This scourge has since moved on to Mali, Senegal, Niger and Chad. Experts predict that if favorable breeding conditions continue, the swarms could move over Sudan, across the Red Sea to the Kingdom and then on to Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The final devastation could be monumental. All efforts to eradicate the swarms at this stage of their development are doomed to be only partially successful. There are simply too many of the locusts to all be poisoned. Indeed such attempts are as pointless as the actions of the inhabitants of Mauritania’s capital who when the sky went dark with the dense brown locust clouds sought to beat them off with brooms and spades.
Brooms and spades is effectively what international donors gave the UN to tackle the problem when it could have been manageable in the early breeding areas of Morocco. Ironically the bill is now rising as officials seek to contain the burgeoning swarms. Each new hatch increases by several multiples the number of locusts and the wet conditions of the current rainy season offer ideal breeding conditions.
The calls upon the First World for aid assistance have recently been flowing thick and fast. Unfortunately, all too often the response to disasters has been reactive. Apart from some stockpiling of items like food and tents there has been little planning, because it is argued that no disaster is necessarily going to be the same as the last.
For want of the investment of a few millions of dollars, donor countries could be facing an aid bill of hundreds of millions to feed people who through no fault of their own have had their substance consumed by ravenous swarms of locusts. It is madness.
Whatever the virtue in such thinking, the scourge of locusts and the appalling damage that they can do to millions of farmers in societies already living on the edge of the breadline is something where proactive thinking can work to stave off the escalation of a problem into a crisis of epic proportions.
