Dominique Burgeon, FAO’s [the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization] Director of Emergencies and Resilience, said the huge [African] desert locust swarms in 2020, some as wide as 60 kilometers, had not been seen in decades, threatening food security in a region where many were already going hungry.
Surveillance and response led to 1.6 million hectares of land being treated. As a result, more than three million tonnes of cereals, valued at approximately $940 million, were protected: enough to feed 21 million people for a year.
“We can say that huge progress has been made, capacities of the countries have been tremendously augmented…but yet the situation is not over”, he told journalists. “We have made a huge effort, we are much better prepared, but we should not be complacent. We should not relax.”
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Locusts began migrating south to northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia when the waters dried up, as experts had predicted.
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“We had forecasted this in October. We had provided early warning to both countries to expect this shortly after mid-December, and that’s indeed what happened”, he said. “And since then, they have been arriving nearly every day.”
“This is a cause of concern, and this is also why it’s extremely important that the control operations…are not disrupted”, said [the FAO’s Senior Locust Forecasting Officer Keith] Cressman.
