By Ryan Dicovitsky
12 January 2009 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: For centuries, locusts have proved a constant thorn in the side of farmers and communities living in Africa’s Sahel region, which roughly spans an area from Mauritania to Sudan and straddles the Saharan desert. Throughout the Sahel and Sahara, locusts will periodically rise out of the desert in the hundreds of thousands, destroying crops, and, in the process, livelihoods of some of the world’s most economically vulnerable people. However, new technologies may make locust attacks a thing of the past.
Last week, the World Bank announced that progress has been made in developing strategies to prevent locust attacks. The international agency described how a group of researchers in the West African nation of Mauritania had stopped locusts from forming into a massive swarm, the type that traditionally causes the most damage when it descends upon a crop.
Devastating locust swarms like this one may soon be a thing of the past. Source:Flickr user [niv]/Creative Commons.
To achieve such a groundbreaking task, researchers at the National Center for Locust Control, which goes by the acronym CNLA, discarded more traditional ways of addressing insect plagues. Conventional wisdom indicates that in order for a pest to be eliminated, pesticide spraying is best. However, widespread spraying has had little impact on swarms of locusts, and has had the additional unwanted effect of harming the environment and human health.
After heavy rains fell on Mauritania last summer, the stage was set for another locust attack. When rains occur and breeding areas are moist, individual locusts thrive and then join together into massive swarms. Recognizing the potential for attacks, researchers jumped into action and began spraying small areas with pesticide. By killing the locusts on a small level, the researchers were able to avoid a congregation of thousands of locusts into a devastating swarm. Sure enough, the swarm never came, and the devastating effects of desert locusts were averted.
The positive results in Mauritania were the result of extensive cooperation on the local, regional, and international level. The CNLA is funded by a program of the World Bank — the African Emergency Locust Program (AELP.) In turn, the AELP is funded by a loan of $60 million, directed at seven countries disproportionately suffering from locust infestations. In addition to Mauritania, those countries are Senegal, Chad, Mali, Gambia, Burkina, and Niger.
Amadou Oumar Ba, an AELP leader for the World Bank in Mauritania and Agricultural Services Specialist, explained to MediaGlobal how the funding from the World Bank enabled the breakthrough to occur. “This regional project was planned as a four-year project intended to reinforce national capacities to prevent and fight locust invasions in the region,” he said. He continued to say that “studies are being completed to better define how [national capacities] should be sustained and national disaster management plans are being put in place. All these should minimize the risk of returning to devastating locust attacks after withdrawal of the [World Bank] financing.”
AELP’s work in Mauritania is scheduled to end in June 2010. Once AELP discontinues its financing, it is hoped that governments will contribute funding to the budgets of national organizations dedicated to combating locust infestations to make up funding gaps. There are clear benefits for governments to continue funding locust prevention projects: In 2003 and 2004, locust swarms descended upon the Sahel, destroying at least 65,000 square kilometers in crop land at an expense of €200 million, or about $280 million. Nearly all the countries hit were among the world’s least developed, making the damage much more serious than it may have been elsewhere. Whereas more developed countries have more extensive resources to combat such disasters, the least developed countries are less fortunate, making programs such as the one in Mauritania especially critical to helping the poorer inhabitants of these countries.. Ryan Dicovitsky
