Now a grasshopper plague threatens Africans

Press, 22 May 1986, Page 14

Now a grasshopper plague threatens Africans

As much of sub-Saharan Africa starts recovering from the worst drought in recent history, a new plague is threatening. The Senegalese grasshopper, expected, to hatch as soon as the rains break this month, could destroy thousands of hectares of food crops in the western Sahel from Mali to Senegal or even the Cape Verde Islands and into Burkina Faso and Chad to the east, reports Lies Graz from Geneva. The first signs of infestation ’

were noticed north of the Malian capital of Bamako last August. An emergency campaign eradicated millions of insects and limited the damage to young crops, biit enough grasshoppers survived to lay huge quantities of eggs. A single egg pod may contain 100 grasshoppers and, when,:, all the females in a group have finished laying, there can be over 1000 pods in a square metre. Since the beginning of this ’St year, the United Nations Food

and Agricultural Organisation has been organising a campaign to control the grasshoppers before they can begin the breeding cycle that leads to swarms of migrating immature adults.which do the most damage. A concentrated campaign, with repeated spraying of insecticide from now until November, might contain the latest cycle before it fully develops. The total cost is estimated at $l6 million and an initial. $9 million was committed

after an emergency F.A.O. meeting in Rome. 1 F.A.O. is particularly concerned since there are no regional insect control organisations operating in West Africa. Grasshoppers do not recognise national boundaries and only a collaborative effort can hope to protect the seedlings of sorghum and millet after the years of famine. F.A.O. experts fear that failure to control the present threat couldWirn a regional prob-

lem into a major tragedy. The grasshoppers, like their cousins the desert locusts, form one of man’s most ancient plagues. Swarms have been measured (by light aircraft flying over them) covering a total of 1000 square kilometres, since there are usually between 40 and 80 million insects in a single square kilometre of swarm that means up to 40 billion individuals. ~ During high activity

each grasshopper can eat its own weight in food each day, with a large swarm devouring 80,000 tons — enough to feed 400,000 people for a year — every 24 hours. Ironically, it was the return of moisture to the parched soil of the Sahel - the semi-desert fringe of the Sahara — that ensured conditions for the new hatching. Copyright — London Observer Service.