The Eighth Plague
West Africa's Locust Invasion

The people meeting one October evening in a government office in Saint-Louis, Senegal, are an extremely diverse group. Some are soldiers, others are firemen, many are agricultural engineers and there even is one humanitarian. Yet a common enemy unites them: locusts!

The insects have been devastating the crops and pastures of a population entirely dependent on subsistence farming. For two months - since August - the team has been meeting each evening at the Regional Directorate for Rural Development, a department set up by the Ministry of Agriculture. They go over work already done to stop the destruction, chart the next day's spraying effort and - in preparation - review fuel and pesticide stocks.

This has been a particularly busy day. The region's 13 plant-protection units, equipped with four-wheel drive vehicles, have sprayed hundreds of hectares (ha) with pesticides used to destroy the swarms. These mobile teams represent Senegal's most immediate village-level response in an environment where the recourse to use lightweight aircraft has been scarce. A team sent to Senegal by the Algerian government has sprayed 450 ha alone in one day. However, the teams also received a grim reminder of the magnitude of the task before them. They spotted an enormous new swarm of the voracious insects.

Locusts are capable of covering 200 kilometres (km) a day and eating their weight in crops throughout the process. The average swarm contains about 500,000 insects per ha. The one seen that day was about 20 km long and five km wide, and could eat 10,000 metric tones (mt) of vegetation daily, the locust-fighters estimated.

An impossible fight without regional coordination

Prevention and mitigation are the two pillars of the fight against locusts, according to the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, an initiative created by the UN General Assembly to reduce the human, economic and social impact of natural disasters. It is co-coordinated by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

By October 2004, it was much too late for prevention. Millions of locusts had already flown south from Mauritania into Senegal. Mitigation remained the only option, which meant eradicating existing swarms before they destroyed the harvests and attempting to save whatever possible for Senegal's predominantly subsistent farming community.

Locust larvae Credit: FAO

Other countries were also affected. Swarms swooping down to Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, were seen as far to the east as Chad and reached Cape Verde in the Atlantic Ocean, presenting the West African region with its biggest locust invasions in years.

The crisis was anything but unexpected. It had been predicted since October 2003, Edouard Tapsoba, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Senegal, told IRIN.

"It's been more than a year that we've been warning the countries and the donor community, without any success, until now," Tapsoba said.

The locust invasions "could have been checked through prevention and surveillance, and by regulating the [locust] populations," Fode Sarr, the Senegalese government's regional director for rural development in Saint-Louis, said. He explained how it is cheaper and easier to spray the larvae with pesticides before they reach maturity and start flying.

Sarr said that while regional cooperation was crucial in fighting locusts, Senegal did not manage to provide much assistance to Mauritania before the swarms crossed their common border.

"We tried to meet with Mauritania authorities to coordinate when the alarm was sounded," he said. "But we didn't have enough resources."

Senegal's military and agriculture ministries coordinated their anti-locust effort from an army base in northern Senegal. However, up to October 2004 - two months into the crisis - the army base was connected by radio to the nearby towns of Podor, Matam and Louga, but still had no direct radio connection with Mauritania. Evidence suggests that despite the frequent discussions of the need for regional cooperation to combat the current swarms of locusts, few results have been seen on the ground.

Prevention - victim of its own success?

Some anti-locust specialists recall the work done by the Joint Organization for the Fight against Locusts and Birds (OCLALAV), a West African group created in the 1960s based out of the Senegalese capital, Dakar. OCLALAV carried out several successful anti-locust campaigns, but later became powerless, lacking resources from governments and the international community.

There are various explanations of how this happened. According to Mauritania's anti-locust centre, a decision was made in the 1980s to "transfer its [OCLALAV's] executive role in the field to its member states". However, according to Sarr, "member states simply stopped paying their dues, depriving the organization of resources".

Others believe the success of the organization's prevention efforts lulled member nations into believing the recurrent plague had been eradicated for good. Since there were no more locusts to be seen on the horizon, complacency set in and years of regional coordination was undone.

The damage caused through these events resulted in reduced regional cooperation, dealing a blow to one of the important building blocks of disaster risk management. It also meant less specialized information was being shared with regard to the extent and growth of the problem. Earlier this year, it started to become evident that huge swarms of locusts were gathering and reproducing in the Mauritanian deserts.

A little-known danger

By 3 October 2004, locust swarms had invaded 679 municipalities in Senegal, including 417 in the Saint-Louis area. As of late September, 164 sites - where the insects had laid eggs - had been identified across the country.

The time for prevention had come and gone.

"Despite warnings from the FAO, people started reacting only when the locusts had effectively crossed into Senegal," Sarr told IRIN. He explained that when there is an absence of specialist information on the problem, people are slow to realize the magnitude.

When OCLALAV became dormant, its expertise, networks and institutional memory disappeared. Since locust invasions are irregular, few organizations - whether governmental or non-governmental - have the skill required to tackle them.

In response to the weak institutional architecture available to address crises such as those presented by locust invasions, FAO created the Emergency Prevention System for Transboundary Animal and Plant Pests and Diseases (EMPRES), a prevention mechanism (see Links). According to Tapsoba, the "FAO is working on the development of EMPRES in West Africa, so that the region can have a lasting regional coordination mechanism for more efficient prevention".

Delayed awareness

In the absence of a regional coordination mechanism, FAO had offered to play the role of rallying point in the fight against locusts as early as October 2003.

Many donors prefer to channel their assistance through UN agencies, both as an institutional reflex and for reasons of transparency, despite the bureaucratic delays that can occur within the UN. In the case of responding to the locusts in 2003 and 2004, the disbursement of contributions was slow.

"Besides a handful of specialists, no one really grasped the scope of the locust invasions, hence the slow reaction," said Regina Davis, head of a team from the US Agency for International Development that has been assisting Mauritania and Senegal.

After a three-hour meeting in his office on that October evening, Sarr seemed tired.

"The locusts fly over from Mauritania," he said, sighing. "As long as the problem isn't dealt with over there, we will continue to receive them."

However, the invaders were due to migrate north from November to March, so Senegal's anti-locust fighters were in for a period of respite - until the next locust season.

[ENDS]