The worst desert locust infestation in 70 years is ravaging East Africa and the Middle East, potentially endangering economies in a region heavily dependent on agriculture for food security.
A swarm can eat enough food to feed 34 million
people in just one day. And within a year, the locusts destroyed over 170,000
acres of land in Somalia and Ethiopia — where people rely on crops for food and
income. ... Now, swarms have invaded 15 counties in Kenya and have reached
Uganda, Tanzania, and Sudan
In recent days, locust swarms have begun to impact
South Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania, having already decimated crops throughout
Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, Eritrea and Djibouti. The Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) of the United Nations earlier this week called the situation
"extremely alarming."
The UN warned of an unprecedented threat to food
security in a part of the world where millions face hunger, and the FAO
estimated that 70,000 hectares of crops in Kenya and around 30,000 hectares in
Ethiopia had been infested. It added that locusts had attacked coffee and tea
crops that account for approximately 30% of Ethiopia's exports.
The FAO also estimated that around 8.5 million
Ethiopians and 3.1 million Kenyans already face food insecurity.
The locusts have now begun breeding along both sides
of the Red Sea in Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia.
Desert locusts can travel up to 150km (95 miles) a
day, and a one-square-kilometer swarm can devour as much food as 35,000 people
in a single day, according to the UN.
Locusts are a collection of certain species of
short-horned grasshoppers in the family Acrididae that have a swarming phase.
These insects are usually solitary, but under certain circumstances they become
more abundant and change their behaviour and habits, becoming gregarious. No
taxonomic distinction is made between locust and grasshopper species; the basis
for the definition is whether a species forms swarms under intermittently suitable
conditions. These grasshoppers are innocuous, their numbers are low, and they
do not pose a major economic threat to agriculture. However, under suitable
conditions of drought followed by rapid vegetation growth, serotonin in their
brains triggers a dramatic set of changes: they start to breed abundantly,
becoming gregarious and nomadic (loosely described as migratory) when their
populations become dense enough. They form bands of wingless nymphs which later
become swarms of winged adults. Both the bands and the swarms move around and
rapidly strip fields and cause damage to crops. The adults are powerful fliers;
they can travel great distances, consuming most of the green vegetation
wherever the swarm settles.
Locusts have formed plagues since prehistory. The
ancient Egyptians carved them on their tombs and the insects are mentioned in
the Iliad, the Bible and the Quran. Swarms have devastated crops and been a
contributory cause of famines and human migrations. More recently, changes in
agricultural practices and better surveillance of locations where swarms tend
to originate have meant that control measures can be used at an early stage.
The traditional means of control are based on the use of insecticides from the
ground or the air, but other methods using biological control are proving
effective.
LOCUST
PLAGUE: Day turns to night as 'biblical plague' of prophecy falls on Middle
East
A LOCUST plague of "biblical
proportions" has descended on Bahrain as a warning sign of the end times,
a prominent Christian evangelist has bizarrely claimed.
Terrifying video footage from Bahrain
shows swarms of locusts blotting out the skies and the Sun. The devastating
swarms have plagued Africa in recent weeks, travelling eastwards towards the
Middle East and China.
Locusts, which can devour entire fields
of crops, have been dubbed a “looming catastrophe” to local infrastructure by
the United Nations.
But Indiana-based preacher and online
evangelist Paul Begley believes there is a bigger, prophetic danger associated
with locusts.
Pastor Begley, who often preaches online
from West Lafayette, said the plagues have been foretold centuries ago by the
Bible.
He said: “Apocalyptic locusts. This is a
biblical plague, this is a biblical sign of the last days – no question.
“These are locusts on a biblical scale. It’s
catastrophic, it’s cataclysmic, it’s apocalyptic and it’s happening right now.
“We’ve been talking about it for a while
but guys, now it has turned the skies black, which takes us to two places in
the Bible.
“You’ve got to go to Exodus Chapter 10
and the plagues of Egypt, and you’ve got to go to Revelation 9 and the smoke
and the locusts that come out of the bottomless pit.”
In Exodus 10, God sends a devastating
plague of insects upon Egypt to punish the Pharaoh for enslaving the Jewish
people.
The scripture reads: “This is what the
Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: ‘How long will you refuse to humble
yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship me.
“If you refuse to let them go, I will
bring locusts into your country tomorrow.
“They will cover the face of the ground
so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the
hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields.
“They will fill your houses and those of
all your officials and all the Egyptians – something neither your parents nor
your ancestors have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till
now’.”
Then in Revelation 9, the final book of
the Bible, a swarm of locusts that “looked like horses prepared for battle”
emerges from the Abyss.
The scripture reads: “The fifth angel
sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the
earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss.
“When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose
from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened
by the smoke from the Abyss.
“And out of the smoke locusts came down
on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth.”
Pastor Begley believes the situation in
Abu Dhabi and other parts of the Middle East and Africa mirror the passages in
the Bible.
