Compass World: Global Swarming
May 2, 2020: This piece won the 2nd place Bunn Award for Journalistic Excellence in the Features category.
Locust swarms have plagued the region around the Indian Ocean forever, but, predictably, climate change has exacerbated their effects. (Wikimedia Commons)
What’s buzzing around East Africa and South Asia these days? Not good news, that’s for sure. Locusts are buzzing, and that’s very bad news. The locust swarms laying waste to the Indian Ocean region this year pose an immense danger to crops: even a small swarm consumes the food of around 35,000 people—daily. Locust swarms have plagued the region forever, but, predictably, climate change has exacerbated their effects.
The Perfect Swarm
Last year, the Indian Ocean had one of its wettest rainy seasons (from October to December) in around 50 years: eight cyclones crossed the ocean, driven in part by accelerating global warming. But, the same rains that blessed Africa with a bountiful harvest last year also stirred dormant locust eggs in Yemen. The ongoing civil war there left them ignored, and the wind and weather scattered them across the Red Sea and into Africa.
Locusts have invaded Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, and Sudan. They have been sighted across South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, and, for the first time in more than 75 years, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Ministry of Locust Control informational tweet. (FAO)
Locusts have a life cycle of three months. The current swarms have already pushed East Africa into a state of crisis, but the next generation, already starting to hatch, could be 20 times as large. By June, the number of locusts over Africa could rise 400-fold. Wetter weather, expected with the upcoming spring monsoons, will not make things better. East Africa is racing against time.
The War on Bugs
Reminiscent of Australia’s Great Emu War a century ago, Uganda is deploying its military to fight the locusts. Soldiers travel through the night to spray pesticides before sunrise, when locusts wake up. The pesticides in use were banned in the United States in 2015 due to evidence that they harmed children’s brain development. (The Trump administration has since reversed this ban.) But, strong pesticides are not enough: Uganda’s motorized pesticide sprayers cannot reach the top branches of trees, from where locusts are free to fly away.
Kenya has deployed five planes to help spray pesticides across the country, and it has also trained youth cadets to help. Neither helped, however, when Kenya ran out of pesticides for more than a week earlier this month, delaying locust extermination.
The locusts are about the size of a human finger. (Al Jazeera English)
Ethiopia has deployed four planes, but it cannot afford the four more it needs to help contain the outbreak before the harvest in March, according to the director of plant protection at Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture. To add insult to injury, foreign exchange reserve shortages delayed Ethiopia’s purchase of chemicals from abroad. The country’s one pesticide-producing factory is working at maximum capacity. Maximum capacity is not enough.
In areas of Somalia contested by the al-Shabaab insurgent group, no one has pesticides, but al-Shabaab does have bullets. Al-Shabaab reportedly fired their machine guns at the swarms, and Somali security forces in Jubbaland did the same. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) remarked that, under such circumstances, contractors were unwilling to aerially spray pesticides.
The FAO has asked for $138 million to help combat the locust outbreak in East Africa. The $52 million currently received still falls far short of what seems needed to save harvests, lives, and stability, especially as infestations spread to countries like the unstable Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Enemy of My Enemy Is (Just This Once) Also My Enemy
At the start of February, Pakistan declared a national emergency in response to locust swarms. The same monsoons that brought the locusts to Africa have given Pakistan its worst infestation in more than two decades. On February 21, following up on Pakistan’s first “locust coordination meeting,” the Pakistani government asked for help from the FAO.
Saadullah Khan, a Pakistani farmer, feared that an insufficient response to the locusts would leave the land barren and drought-like. Lives could be decimated. “Most of the people have here taken loans for cultivating their crops,” Khan noted, and urged the government to help save farmers from starvation; ironically, given the looming threat of famine, Bloomberg News reports that Pakistan’s government has encouraged citizens to start eating the locusts.
India is also victim to the locust infestation, which has been most pronounced on its shared (but closed) border with Pakistan. Its government has acted to buy drones and special equipment to prevent the currently limited outbreak from worsening. Still, quick action has not been enough to prevent serious deprivation in the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat: those state governments have already identified around 65,000 farmers who will receive compensation.
Indian leadership holds a "locust coordination meeting." (Agriculture India)
According to anonymous Indian government sources, Indian and Pakistani officials have met multiple times to review the crisis at hand. While India sells pesticides to multiple countries, it has not yet extended that offer to Pakistan. But, in an infrequent show of good faith, the offer itself is not entirely out of the question. “If Pakistan needs and our government allows, we can supply to Pakistan. We have manufacturing units in various countries. We can ramp up production of a particular insecticide depending on the demand,” an anonymous official from an Indian pesticide company told Reuters.
Untitled Duck Game
China, at least, does not seem to be ducking the problem. Separated from India and Pakistan by the Himalayas, China is less threatened by the locusts, but its officials are worrying anyway. To save its agriculture in an economy already bruised by COVID-19 (the coronavirus), China is reportedly preparing an army of 100,000 ducks to fight locusts in Pakistan.
You heard that right. Lu Lizhi, a senior researcher at the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, calls the ducks “biological weapons.” Each duck can eat more than 200 locusts in a day. Of course, ducks are safer for humans and the environment than are pesticides. Before the duck army deploys to Pakistan later this year, it will be trained in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost region.
Zhang Long is not so sure if fighting locusts with a duck army would fly. (Times of India)
Zhang Long, a professor at China Agricultural University, is not so sure if this plan will fly. “Ducks rely on water, but in Pakistan’s desert areas, the temperature is very high.” Zhang was part of a group the Chinese government sent to Pakistan to assess the spread of the infestation.
A Climate Change Story (but isn’t that everything these days?)
The World Economic Forum maintains that the best way to fight locust swarms is to prevent them from happening in the first place. Local monitoring of wind and weather, soil moisture, and locust-breeding locations is essential to knowing where to snuff out potential threats before they grow. Waiting for the weather to dry up, as West Africa tried during a 2003-2005 outbreak, cost $400 million and five times that amount in lost crops.
Observing the tracks of cyclones over the Indian Ocean in 2019 shows how locusts could be carried by wind both to East Africa and South Asia. (Wikimedia Commons)
But, preventative action may only be getting harder, thanks to global warming. The last five years have been the hottest on record since the industrial revolution, and 20 of the countries warming most quickly are in Africa. Studies show that locust outbreaks occur more frequently in warmer weather: indeed, this outbreak occurred due to rapidly warming oceans and wetter and more frequent storms. The wet monsoon season around the Horn of Africa last fall saw rainfall more than four times the normal amount, thanks to the effects of climate change on Indian Ocean weather patterns.
Pesticides, crop-duster planes, bullets, and even ducks can only go so far to fight locusts or mitigate their effects. Locusts breed in the warm and the wet—and the world is only growing warmer and wetter as humans neglect the impacts of their actions. If citizens fail to bug their governments about addressing climate change, climate change will start bugging us.