Subsistence agriculture occurs when farmers grow food crops to meet the needs of themselves and their families. In subsistence agriculture, farm output is targeted to survival and is mostly for local requirements with little or no surplus.
Africa's Huge Locust Swarms Are Growing at the Worst Time:
As the coronavirus pandemic exploded across the world earlier this year, another even more conspicuous plague was tearing through East Africa: locusts. The voracious little beasts are particularly fond of carbohydrates like grains, a staple of subsistence farmers across the continent. Back in January, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicted the worst was still to come, and that by June, the size of the swarms could grow by a factor of 500.
And now, at the worst time, a second wave of locusts 20 times bigger than the first has descended on the region, thanks to heavy rains late last month, according to the FAO. The swarms have infiltrated Yemen and firmly established themselves across the Persian Gulf, having laid eggs along 560 miles of Iran's coastline. New swarms are particularly severe in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia.
"The timing is really horrendous, because the farmers are just planting, and the seedlings are just coming up now since it's the beginning of the rainy season," says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer with the FAO. "And it's right at the same time when you have an increasing number of swarms in Kenya and in Ethiopia. There's already pictures and reports of the seedlings getting hammered by the swarms. So basically that's it for the farmers' crops."
"This represents an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods," FAO officials wrote in a brief last week. All this is happening while the region locks down to stave off the coronavirus pandemic, and as travel restrictions mean experts can't get to countries to train people. It'd be hard to imagine a more brutal confluence of factors. "The problem is that most of the countries were not ready, and are now invaded with swarms," says ecologist Cyril Piou, of the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development, which helps economically developing countries with agricultural issues. "The solution is to try to control as much as you can."
It would also be hard to imagine a more perfect enemy than the locust: in this case, the desert locust, one of the 20 species of normally solitary grasshopper that go "gregarious," forming into swarms that can travel 90 miles in a day. Their transformation and swarming is triggered by rain; desert locusts can only lay their eggs in moist sand, since dry sand would cook them. After a storm, the locusts breed like crazy, packing a single square meter of sand with perhaps 1,000 eggs.
When those eggs hatch, the baby locusts find themselves in a newly lush environment loaded with food. They'll strip it clean and take off in swarms in search of ever more vegetation to obliterate. Their bodies actually transform to prepare them for the journey; their muscles grow bulkier, and their color changes from a drab brownish green into an electric yellow and black.
[...] This particular outbreak began with heavy rains from two cyclones in May and October of 2018 that hit the southern Arabian Peninsula. This allowed two generations of desert locusts to form into swarms. Each generation can be 20 times bigger than the previous one. "The main problem is that these exceptional rains occurred in an area where there's a lot of insecurity, wars, and so on, so the initial stages of the upsurge of the outbreaks were not detected in time," says entomologist Michel Lecoq, former director of the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development.
[...] A locust outbreak [...] is a lot like a wildfire: Put it out early, and you're good. Delay, and the swarm will spread and spread until it runs out of fuel—the food that subsistence farmers across Africa rely on to survive.
As grave a situation as the COVID-19 pandemic is — and it is indeed a grave situation — given the choice, I would not choose battling swarming locusts, instead.
Related Stories
Crunch, crunch: Africa's locust outbreak is far from over:
The crunch of young locusts comes with nearly every step. The worst outbreak of the voracious insects in Kenya in 70 years is far from over, and their newest generation is now finding its wings for proper flight.
The livelihoods of millions of already vulnerable people in East Africa are at stake, and people like Boris Polo are working to limit the damage. The logistician with a helicopter firm is on contract with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, helping to find and mark locust swarms for the targeted pesticide spraying that has been called the only effective control.
"It sounds grim because there's no way you're gonna kill all of them because the areas are so vast," he told The Associated Press from the field in northwestern Kenya on Thursday. "But the key of the project is to minimize" the damage, and the work is definitely having an effect, he said.
[...] In the past week and a half, Polo said, the locusts have transformed from hoppers to more mature flying swarms that in the next couple of weeks will take to long-distance flight, creating the vast swarms that can largely blot out the horizon. A single swarm can be the size of a large city.
Once airborne, the locusts will be harder to contain, flying up to 200 kilometers (124 miles) a day.
"They follow prevailing winds," Polo said. "So they'll start entering Sudan, Ethiopia and eventually come around toward Somalia." By then, the winds will have shifted and whatever swarms are left will come back into Kenya.
An irresistible scent makes locusts swarm, study finds:
On its own, a locust is fairly harmless. But so-called solitary locusts can undergo a metamorphosis, changing colour and joining together with millions of others in catastrophic clouds that strip fields.
So what prompts locusts to transform from solitary to "gregarious"?
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature reveals the secret lies in a pheromone.
Almost like an irresistible perfume, the chemical compound is emitted by locusts when they find themselves in proximity to just a few others of their kind.
The chemical attracts other locusts, who join the group and also begin emitting the scent, creating a feedback loop that results in enormous swarms.
The discovery offers several tantalizing possibilities, including genetically engineering locusts without the receptors that detect the swarming pheromone, or weaponising the pheromone to attract and trap the insects.
[...] It focused on the migratory locust, the most widely distributed species of the insect, and examined several compounds produced by the bug.
It found that one in particular—4-vinylanisole, or 4VA—appeared to attract locusts when emitted, and that the more locusts flocked together, the more 4VA they emitted.
Journal Reference:
Xiaojiao Guo, Qiaoqiao Yu, Dafeng Chen, et al. 4-Vinylanisole is an aggregation pheromone in locusts [$], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2610-4)
Recently:
(2020-07-06) Crunch, Crunch: Africa's Locust Outbreak is Far from Over
(2020-04-19) Africa's Huge Locust Swarms are Growing at the Worst Time
(2020-02-24) Locust Swarms Arrive in South Sudan, Threatening More Misery
(2020-01-30) Climate Change Behind Africa's Worst Locust Invasion in Decades
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @08:47PM
Locusts are tasty treats that our Stavin' Marvin friends can chow down on while practicing social isolation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @08:58PM (4 children)
I've found my next career!
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @09:49PM
World hunger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKNoJ2BzSRU [youtube.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:16PM (1 child)
Wind farming didn't work out so well?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:22PM
AGW model builder
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:30PM
Too late, Jared's already been put in charge of that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @09:15PM (6 children)
If you can't beat it, eat it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:12PM
Where are we going to get enough BBQ sauce?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:19PM
And Kosher too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosher_locust [wikipedia.org]
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NickM on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:20PM (3 children)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:36PM
Toxic schmansic. Sprinkle some garlic power and tabasco, and all's good. For gourmands, sprinkle some parmesan cheese.
Ain't nothing Tabasco can't solve.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Arik on Monday April 20 2020, @01:44AM (1 child)
Locusts are eaten every day without symptoms of this. The chemical the article mentions, Hyoscyamine, is prescribed for humans with certain conditions. It might be toxic but it doesn't seem to be particularly poisonous to humans at the levels involved.
A more realistic worry is that of insecticide, however. Obviously that's not something you want to be eating.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @05:39AM
This is north/east african hoppers. Ain't nobody flying around to dump insecticides on them. They are genuine organic(TM) giant mutant grasshoppers, certified for um-hm good eatin'.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 19 2020, @09:22PM (7 children)
Someone had to say it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:34PM (1 child)
That's what she said!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:38PM
Yes it's true, this man has no dick.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @11:59PM (3 children)
God is getting senile, forgot he already did the the plagues, doing them again
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @01:22AM (2 children)
Can't have a good plague without locusts.
(Score: 5, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday April 20 2020, @04:51AM (1 child)
Technically, it's a pestilence.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday April 20 2020, @04:51AM
You know, one of the four horsemen?
(Score: 3, Funny) by PiMuNu on Monday April 20 2020, @01:03PM
I'm holding out for frogs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:28PM (4 children)
The psychopaths want to thin out the population a bit anyway. This conveniently clears out the old and the sick. You know what they say about deadwood. Nature is what nature does.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:35PM (1 child)
How does Bill Gates benefit from dead Africans? Seems that would be fewer people to sell Windows licenses to.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @01:26AM
"Windows isn't done till Locust won't run".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @10:38PM
Just make sure you don't get old or sick else that's a major oops.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @11:53PM
>thin out the population
Nope, I’ll wager that even on the worst day of the pandemic, births will exceed deaths
https://www.worldometers.info/ [worldometers.info]
In fact, could lead to a birth boom
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/sep/18/the-african-youth-boom-whats-worrying-bill-gates [theguardian.com]
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Monday April 20 2020, @01:56PM
Luckily for the Africans, DDT is still banned and so they are safe.