Sign of the end times in Sudan...

[insein]

http://iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=qw109025352186B252

Locusts have a field day in starving Africa

July 19 2004 at 06:12PM

By Alexandre Grosbois

Dakar - In an invasion of north and west Africa that may take on biblical proportions, locusts are swarming across the Sahara desert to threaten the yields from crops already wizened by years of drought in many of the world's poorest countries.

The United Nations's Food and Agriculture Organization announced July 5 that the first swarms of desert locusts were abandoning their spring breeding areas and heading into Mauritania, Senegal and Mali, with more expected in coming weeks.

Without immediate attention to the plague of locusts, FAO warned, entire fields of maize, cassava and other staple crops for the region will be razed to the ground by the pests' insatiable appetites.

'It's only just begun'
The swarms, which can devour in a twinkling enough food to feed 2 500 people, could make their way across west Africa into Niger, Chad and western Sudan, which is already facing a dire food shortage due to continued unrest in the Darfur region.

"It's only just begun," Ousseynou Diop of Senegal's agriculture ministry said, hearkening back to the last major locust invasions that hit Senegal in 1986 and 1993.

While Senegal suffered little crop damage in the past invasions, the country is not well prepared to fend off the swarms, which are due to arrive at a particularly crucial time in the growing season.

"They used to come after harvest time, around November, but this year they are landing right in time for planting season," he said. "They could devour everything, all of the seedlings - it could be a catastrophe."

From 1987 to 1989, swarms of locusts stuffed themselves with what amounted to about $300-million in damages to food production in north and west Africa, the FAO has said.

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