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By TOM ODULA
BARAKA, Kenia
AP Agency
In a caravan of pickup trucks full of spray guns, soldiers drive through the Baraka hills, leaving behind a trail of dust and shocked villagers.
Vehicles slow down when soldiers spot the enemy: billions of invading desert locusts, which have landed in a throbbing bank where forest meets farmland.
The deployment of troops alongside regular agricultural officials is an indication of the seriousness of the threat, as the locust plague in East Africa continues for the second year in a row. Young lobsters arrive in waves from breeding areas in Somalia, where insecurity complicates control measures.
The planting season is beginning in Kenya, but the delayed rains have brought some optimism to the fight against locusts, although farmers still fear for their harvests.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) says that flocks of locusts have been sighted in the Rift Valley, where maize, wheat and potatoes are produced, three staples in Kenya.
However, FAO noted that due to poor rains in Kenya and neighboring Ethiopia, flocks in both countries remain immature. In addition, its population continues to decline due to ongoing pest control operations.
If it doesn’t rain, the insects don’t reproduce, drastically limiting the scale and extent of their threat, FAO said in a recent report.
‘For this reason, there is cautious optimism that the current wave is subsiding in the Horn of Africa, especially if poor rains limit breeding this spring in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, followed by similarly light rains during the spring. summer in northeastern Ethiopia. ‘
Authorities last year managed to contain what was considered the largest locust infestation in Kenya in 70 years, mainly with coordinated operations to spray insecticide from the air that allowed large areas to be covered quickly.
Many of those banks were in uninhabited areas. This year, lobsters have posed a different challenge by roosting in more inhabited areas. That means aerial spraying is not an option, because it could negatively affect people and livestock, explained Ambrose Nyatich, an expert on livelihoods recovery at FAO.
So the delay in the rains is an advantage, at least in part.
Desert locusts pose an unprecedented risk to those who make a living from agriculture and to food security in the fragile region, plagued by economic crises, droughts and conflict, FAO said.
An ordinary lobster flock can contain up to 150 million locusts per square kilometer, according to the East African regional body, the Intergovernmental Authority for Development. “An average flock can destroy food crops in a day to feed 2,500 people,” the organization said.
Peasants like Hannah Nyokabi, in the community of Baraka – which means “blessing” in Swahili – find themselves in a difficult situation. Lack of rain may reduce the threat from locusts, but it will almost certainly mean a poor harvest.
“Things have gone very bad. If you look at the farm, there is nothing there, “he said. “We have children in school, and we depend on the farm to pay their tuition.”
Another farmer, Anne Wa Mago, 60, said a bad harvest was better than nothing.
“We are lucky that (the locusts) arrived when we had not planted, otherwise they would have devastated our plantation,” he said, pointing to the thousands of voracious insects that filled a tree branch.
Groups of children, some still in their school uniforms, ran through the farms catching lobsters in the air or on the ground.
For them, the flock that arrived recently and that almost hid the sun, is a stroke of fortune without equal. Lobsters can be sold by the kilo to a non-governmental organization that wants to turn them into feed for farm animals.
“This is money coming to our doorstep,” said 16-year-old John Mbithi. Anne Wangari, 12, said she had put on 35 kilos before leaving for school.
But FAO’s Nyatich advised against using lobsters as food because they could have been sprayed with insecticide.
“The initiatives that some organizations are launching to try to use lobsters for animal or fish feed are something that needs to be looked at in terms of how we can regulate it, perhaps in the future,” he said.
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