SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
"By February, March of next year they'll be laying eggs in Kenya again," he said. The next generation could be up to 20 times the size of the previous one.
The trouble is, only Kenya and Ethiopia are doing the pesticide control work. "In places like Sudan, South Sudan, especially Somalia, there's no way, people can't go there because of the issues those countries are having," Polo said.
"The limited financial capacity of some of the affected countries and the lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic have further hampered control efforts. Additionally, armed conflict in Somalia rendered some of the locust breeding areas inaccessible," ICPAC expert Abubakr Salih Babiker and colleagues wrote in correspondence published in the journal Nature Climate Change this month.
Previously:
(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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @01:13PM (7 children)
Not food aid. Crop insurance redeemable in product.
Food aid breaks normal market forces. In Haiti it evolved into dumping and the domestic agro markets never recovered. In Somalia the distribution network couldn't support the aid, so we got Blackhawk down. Foold aid helps the people. Crop insurance helps the people help themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @01:51PM (4 children)
Intriguing. But wouldn't crop insurance be very difficult to administer when there are thousands of small farms...and (I'm going to speculate) those farms don't have good record keeping, or even a person capable of dealing with paperwork like this?
Agreed that pesticides seem like a bad solution, unless something special can be targeted at locust reproduction or some other way that won't ruin the whole ecosystem. Many of the other bugs there are probably useful.
On a tiny scale, I've had great success vacuuming up unwanted ground bee nests with a shop vac. I wonder if some collection method could be worked out for locusts?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @03:32PM (3 children)
Cell phone penetration is high in these countries. I imagine a system could be worked out.
Regarding locust control, the answer is a simple one. Stop monocropping and start using permaculture principles in agro-engineering. Complex ecosystems support a wider diversity of natural predators. It isn't easy, but it is that simple.
The people who know, know. But flogging ignorance pays better than teaching.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @03:50PM (1 child)
Permaculture is great, but any permie solution to locusts would probably be extremely long term.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @04:28PM
It will take a long time but there are several national scale reforestation projects going on right now. The one in north China is probably the most impressive. But there are a few in Africa.
Yeah it will take decades if not a century. But that is the scale of the problem we created. And as with any big problem nobody wants to fix, there is a huge number of snake oil salesmen saying they've got some easier way.
There isn't one. Just a lot of wasted time in the intermediate paying fraudsters to pretend to solve the problem.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @05:44PM
In Kenya, if you don't have a cell phone your only other option is cash (credit cards are not really a thing for places not catering to tourists). Not smartphones with (Apple|Google)pay, but M-PESA a txt based payment system. You can even pay for a taxi or stuff you buy from a produce stand with M-PESA. But, it only works on one carrier. In some places in Kenya, I saw quite a few folks with two phones, one for M-PESA, the other for calls.
Agreed, everybody has a cell phone (but mostly brick phones).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa [wikipedia.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @02:50PM (1 child)
>> Foold aid helps the people. Crop insurance helps the people help themselves.
A thermonuclear bomb solves both the locust problem and the jihadi problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @03:04PM
Plus free double glazing.