Cape Town — A potentially serious infestation of desert locusts has broken out in Mauritania, but experts are hopeful that quickly implemented countermeasures will prevent a repeat of the plague that hit the region five years ago.
Mauritania’s National Locust Centre has 17 teams carrying out survey-and-control operations in the west of the country. Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, said that as long as there was no unusually heavy rain by the end of November the outbreak should be under control by December.
“These infestations can happen several times in a single year, or we can go several years without one,” Cressman told AllAfrica in a telephone interview. Whereas in 2003 and 2004, Mauritania was unprepared for an outbreak, “this year we are lucky because Mauritania has sufficient resources in the field and there is good regional solidarity.”
The danger of infestations escalated with each new breeding season, he said, since the number of locusts grows about 10-fold with each breeding cycle.
A situation update published by the FAO’s “Locust Watch” last week reported that although there was no immediate threat to other countries in the region, authorities in those nations were on standby and ready to help Mauritania.
“Morocco has mobilized survey teams and two aircraft in the extreme south of the Western Sahara just in case locust adults arrive from Mauritania,” the update said. “So far, ecological conditions remain dry in southern Morocco and no significant locust infestations have been detected.”
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The update added that if unusually heavy and widespread rains occurred in the coming weeks, and if control operations were less effective than expected, that small swarms of locusts could form in early December and move north into northern Mauritania and southern Morocco and breed during the winter.
“This could eventually lead to further migration and breeding during the spring as far north as the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and Algeria,” the report said.
But an FAO news release said this was a “slim” probability. “The infestation is smaller than the outbreak in 2003 that led to a regional plague in 2004-05,” it added. “No significant rain has fallen this month and vegetation is starting to dry out. All countries within the region are much better prepared than in 2003 and have sufficient resources in place to bring the current situation under control.”
