A swarm of desert locusts has entered South Sudan, bringing east Africa's worst locust outbreak in decades to an eighth country.
The locusts crossed the Red Sea from Yemen late last year, and billions have been travelling across the region in massive swarms at speeds of up to 140km a day. Each locust can eat its own weight in food daily, and swarms pose a significant risk to crops in a region already plagued by drought and other unusual weather over the past few years.
In South Sudan, where about 60 per cent of the population is food insecure following a brutal civil war, agriculture minister Onyoti Adigo Nyikuac told journalists the government was training civilians to spray pesticides in the hope of stopping the locust spread.
“We need chemicals for spraying and also sprayers,” he said, according to AFP. “You will also need cars to move while spraying and then later if it becomes worse, we will need aircraft.”
In an email, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) told The Irish Times that climate conditions – including the unusual frequency of cyclones – had created a situation that allowed an "unprecedented" number of locusts to gather.
“While desert locusts are an age-old threat, we fear something is changing,” she said.
The FAO said it had received $22 million (€20.4 million euro) after issuing an appeal on January 28th for $76 million to tackle the locust outbreak. If the problem is not addressed quickly, the locusts could multiply 500 times by June, it says.
At the moment, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are the worst impacted, with Somalia declaring the locusts a national emergency.
Reproduction
"The situation in east Africa is still not at plague level, but this upsurge could become a plague – hence the focus on swift action to inhibit another round of reproduction," said the FAO spokeswoman. Locusts are already breeding along both sides of the Red Sea, in Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Ethiopian foreign minister Gedu Andargachew on Tuesday, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo pledged $8 million in US support to help tackle the locust outbreak. Mr Pompeo is concluding his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa in two years in office.
East Africans are taking to social media to share photos and videos of locust sightings. In Uganda, where grasshoppers are a delicacy to some, locals began joking on Facebook about whether the locusts would be tastier fried or boiled, and whether garlic would add to the flavour.
The UN itself has listed recipes on the FAO website, saying locusts are "rich in protein", and can be caught in a net and eaten.
Some Ugandans, it says, clean the locusts by removing the legs and wings, and then fry them with chopped onion and season them with curry powder. In Cambodia, locusts are stuffed with peanuts and barbecued, it says, while a traditional preparation method in the Philippines would be to cook them slowly in soy sauce, vinegar, crushed garlic, bay leaf and black peppercorns.
