Viewpoint: Synthetic pesticides are the solution to East Africa’s famine-causing locust swarms

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Credit: AP/Ben Curtis

For months, billions of these pests have migrated from remote deserts into populated regions of East Africa and into Asia, decimating crops and producing severe famines. In a single day, these massive locust swarms can consume as much food as 35 million people can eat in a day, resulting in severe food insecurity for more than 20 million people.

Just as with COVID-19 and so many other challenges, manmade chemical technologies are the only hope to mitigate such crises, be they vaccines, disinfectants, pesticides, or whatever.

Unfortunately, many developing nations in Africa struggle under socialist and authoritarian regimes that make wealth generation and technological development nearly impossible. To top that off, left-wing groupsโ€”often funded by wealthy leftists overseasโ€”fight solutions with political pressure and by spreading misinformation related to pesticides and other essential agricultural technologies.

As I haveย discussed before, Greenpeaceย and other groupsย have pushed pesticideย bansย and regulations regardless of theirย human tollย or our ability to use them in relatively safe and targeted ways to protect human health and the environment.

Kenya, fortunately, has been able toย deploy pesticides, reducing ย locust populations and mitigating the terrible impact there. Yet the locusts keep moving, and many other nations donโ€™t have enough resources to access and deploy pesticides ….

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