[BBC] JOHANNESBURG ‐ Uganda scrambled to respond to the arrival of the biggest locust outbreak that parts of East Africa have seen in decades, while the United Nations warned Monday that "we simply cannot afford another major shock" to an already vulnerable region.An emergency government meeting hours after the locusts were spotted inside Uganda on Sunday decided to deploy military forces to help with ground-based pesticide spraying, while two planes for aerial spraying will arrive as soon as possible, a statement said. Aerial spraying is considered the only effective control.
"Fried up, they taste like Cicadas," he enthused
The swarms of billions of locusts have been destroying crops in Kenya, which hasn’t seen such an outbreak in 70 years, as well as Somalia and Ethiopia, which haven’t seen this in a quarter-century. The insects have exploited favorable wet conditions after unusually heavy rains and experts say climate change is expected to bring more of the same.
Keith Cressman, the UN Food and Agriculture Organizations senior locust forecasting officer, said Kenya has received "waves and waves of swarms" since the beginning of the year from the Horn of Africa and "over the weekend they moved on the side of Mount Kilimanjaro across the border into Tanzania."
"Also over the weekend they moved into northeastern Uganda," he told a news conference at UN headquarters in New York. "We’re expecting any day they will move across the border into the southeast corner of South Sudan," where another several million people face hunger as the country struggles to emerge from civil war.
A medium-size swarm of locusts can eat the same amount of food as the entire population of Kenya, Cressman said and "that swarm in one day can eat the same amount of food as everybody here in the tri-state area, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. So not taking action in time ‐ you can see the consequences."
UN officials warn that immediate action is needed before more rainfall in the weeks ahead brings fresh vegetation to feed new generations of locusts. If left unchecked, their numbers could grow up to 500 times before drier weather arrives, they say.
