Freeing Africa from Locust Swarms Is All of Humanity’s Task

Jan. 26, 2020 (EIRNS)—The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is calling for immediate international action to help the nations of Eastern Africa destroy the worst outbreak of desert locusts in 25 years. “The current Desert Locust situation is extremely alarming and represents an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods in the Horn of Africa,” the FAO warned on Jan. 20.

Should massive aerial spraying against the swarms now spreading from Ethiopia and Somalia into Kenya not be carried out before March, when rains pick up, the swarms can increase by some 20-fold in just three months, as they feed on increased vegetation. Planes, spraying equipment, and pesticides are urgently needed. Kenya and Ethiopia, for example, only have four planes each for spraying their large territories, a Kenyan pest control specialist told Associated Press.

Also: “Important locust situations continue to develop along both sides of the Red Sea, in Oman and in southern Iran,” in addition to the signs of initial spread to other East African nations, such as Uganda and South Sudan, the FAO reported.

The FAO categorizes the desert locust as the most devastating of all locust species, because they form swarms that can fly up to 150 km a day. A very small swarm is capable of eating the same amount of food in one day as 35,000 people!

The key is to act swiftly. The FAO advises that “if infestations are not detected and controlled, devastating plagues can develop that often take several years and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring under control with severe consequences on food security and livelihoods.”

Locust plagues are neither new, nor caused by “climate change,” as some Malthusians already claim. When the last catastrophic plague was building in the late 1980s, Lyndon LaRouche’s international movement identified the deliberately genocidal policies which create the conditions which foster locust devastations—both economic (IMF austerity) and environmentalist opposition to pesticide spraying—and campaigned for the development of such new technologies as electromagnetic pulsed waves to be deployed against the swarms. A review of the relevant reports on the locust threat from the late 1980s in LaRouche’s magazine, Executive Intelligence Review, is a recommended step towards mobilizing the needed international action now.