Amid a locust infestation in East Africa threatening to explode to biblical proportions, the United Nations is warning that the already vulnerable region “simply cannot afford another major shock.”
Swarms of billions of insects are destroying crops in Kenya, the country’s worst outbreak in 70 years, the Associated Press reported. Somalia and Ethiopia are experiencing their worst outbreak in a quarter-century amid exceptionally heavy rains that are favorable to the insects.
“There is the risk of a catastrophe,” U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock said Monday in New York at a briefing.
Last week, Burgeon told the AP that without enough aerial spraying, the outbreak could turn into a plague, “and when you have a plague, it takes years to control.
Lowcock said Monday that 13 million people already face severe food insecurity, with 10 million of them in places affected by locusts.
A medium-size swarm of locusts “in one day can eat the same amount of food as everybody here in the tri-state area, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York,” said Keith Cressman, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s senior locust forecasting officer
“So not taking action in time — you can see the consequences,” he said, according to AP.
It could get a whole lot worse, the U.N. officials said, if immediate action isn’t taken before more rainfall provides more vegetation for new generations of locusts.
Five-hundred times worse, they warned, if unchecked before the dry weather comes.
Lowcock said Kenya has received “waves and waves of swarms” since the beginning of the year from the Horn of Africa.”
Over the weekend, they moved into Tanzania and northeastern Uganda. And any day, he said, they could move into South Sudan, where several million already face hunger as the nation tries to recover from civil war.
Another 20 million people in the region could face food insecurity, according to Dominique Burgeon, the FAO’s emergency and resilience director.
The U.N. has asked for $76 million in immediate aid, with just under $20 million in hand. The United States said Monday it has released $800,000 and the European Union has released 1 million euros.
But Lowcock told reporters the response so far “is not gonna work, unless there’s a big scale-up.”
