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posted by martyb on Monday July 06 2020, @10:49AM   Printer-friendly

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


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @11:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @11:36PM (#1017391)

    Twice as many hungry kniggers and jihadis.

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