By Paul Homewood
Biblical locust swarms – and, of course, it’s all due to climate change:
The locusts are coming thick and fast as the low-flying aircraft punches through the swarm, leaving khaki-coloured streaks smeared across the plane’s windscreen and obstructing the view outside.
But the pilot – despite travelling at 100 miles per hour – is unfazed. He simply winds down the window of the unpressurised cockpit, reaches his arm outside and wipes away what’s left of the insects with a damp cloth.
This is life on the frontline for locust hunters, as they battle to contain the worst plague to hit the Horn of Africa for some seven decades – on Monday, the United Nations will convene a conference in Rome with the aim of mobilising $70 million (£53 million) to help respond to the crisis.
The swarms emerged in Yemen early last summer but have since poured into northern Kenya – where a “super-swarm” some 2,400 square kilometres wide was spotted last week.
It is only the third time since 1950 that locusts swarms have been seen on this scale.
In biblical style, the locusts have already devoured and destroyed 70,000 hectares (175,000 acres) of farmland across Somalia and Ethiopia, and earlier this month a passenger plane was diverted and grounded in Ethiopia after an unexpected swarm blocked its entry to Dire Dawa airport…..
Concerns have already been raised that the invasion could threaten a food crisis and stall economic growth in the region unless the situation is brought under control.
“The current situation is easily the worst we’ve had in decades and is a result of very unusual cyclones,” said Keith Cressman, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) lead locust expert.
“Cyclones bring very heavy rains, meaning breeding conditions for desert locusts are extremely favourable for much longer than usual. As a result swarms can grow very rapidly… the numbers just skyrocket.”
He added that these cyclones have in turn been triggered by climate change, which has made extreme weather events all the more common worldwide.
Swarms of desert locusts fly up into the air from crops Credit: AP
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/25/inside-locust-mega-swarms-devouring-crops-africa/
I sometimes wonder about the overused and ridiculous epithet of “biblical”. It is strange that we now get all of these disasters because of global warming, even though they were evidently perfectly common 2000 years ago!
And what about “climate change”?
As we know, the number of cyclones has not been increasing worldwide, despite global warming, which rather makes a nonsense of the claim that these cyclones have in turn been triggered by climate change.
The number of cyclones in East Africa last year, or more to the point the amount of rainfall, may be greater than average, but this is the direct result of the strong Indian Ocean Dipole, which also brought severe drought to Australia. There is no evidence whatsoever that this was in any way connected to climate change.
It is also ironic that we are bemoaning wet weather for East Africa, which is really a boon. It is of course the lush vegetation resulting which has encouraged the plague of locusts, just as it did in biblical times.
There is however a much more sinister aspect to this story, as Climate Change Dispatch relates:
Two weeks ago a Boeing 737 on final approach to Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, flew into a massive cloud of locusts swarming above the airport.
The insects were sucked into the plane’s engines and splattered across the windshield, blinding the pilots to the runway ahead.
Throttling up to climb above the swarm, the pilot had to depressurize the cabin so he could reach around from the side window and clear the windshield by hand. Diverting to Addis Ababa, the plane was able to land safely.
The locusts that almost brought down the 737 are part of the worst infestation to hit Africa in 75 years.
Swarms of locusts can blanket 460 miles at a time and consume more than 400 million pounds of vegetation a day; and the grasshopper-like insects increase logarithmically, meaning locust swarms could be 500 times bigger in six months.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calls the threat “unprecedented,” but attempts at aerial spraying have been too little, too late — largely because of FAO’s own politically-driven agenda to limit pesticides — and experts fear Africa may once again be tilting toward widespread famine.
As poor farmers futilely shoo the voracious insects away with sticks, this modern plague highlights the urgent need for pesticides to protect crops and save lives.
It also casts into stark relief the tragic consequences of UN, European and environmentalist campaigns to deny these life-saving chemicals to developing nations.
Over the last decade, development organizations and activist NGOs have increasingly pushed organic-style agriculture on the poorest nations, making assistance dependent on a highly politicized version of “agro-ecology” that arbitrarily limits pesticides, bans advanced hybrid crops and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and extols the virtues of “peasant” farming.
The result is that Africa has been left virtually defenseless against successive natural assaults to the continent’s ability to feed itself.
The locusts arrive on top of Africa’s on-going struggle with the Fall Army Worm (FAW), which has already spread to some 44 countries. It feeds on a range of plants, but prefers corn, the staple food for most Africans, and has reduced yields by 50% in many regions.
In the Americas, FAW is kept in check by a combination of insect-resistant GMOs and modern pesticides.
Yet most African countries have not authorized GMOs because of well-funded environmental propaganda campaigns demonizing the technology — claiming GMOs cause everything from impotence to cancer and autism — and fear of losing their primary export market in Europe, which has arbitrarily restricted critical pesticides used in every other advanced, developed region of the world.
The FAO, while discouraging pesticides and GMOs, advises farmers to pick off the insects one by one and crush them with their hands.
Add to this epidemics of Wheat Rust (potential crop loss 100%); Banana Wilt (50% crop loss); and Cassava Mosaic Virus (up to 90% loss).
There are thousands of pests around the world that attack agricultural plants, and they don’t just kill crops.
Molds that can only be controlled with pesticides produce highly poisonous metabolites called mycotoxins that, if they don’t kill you immediately, can give you cancer and destroy your immune system.
They probably constitute the number one food-health threat even in wealthy nations, but we keep levels safe with pesticides, GMOs, and expensive food inspection regimes — all things Africa is being denied or can’t afford.
Then there are the insect-borne diseases like Malaria, Zika, Dengue, and countless other parasitic and viral infections.
When Zika or West Nile threaten our cities, we haul out the spray cans and ignore the griping of environmentalists.
In Africa, however, the anti-pesticide groups hold sway. At their urging, Kenya may soon ban over 200 pesticides that evidence-based regulatory agencies around the world have deemed safe and that Kenya’s farmers desperately need.
Those who think small-scale organic farming is friendlier to mother nature are wrong. Organic farmers use lots of pesticides.
They’re simply “natural” ones, like copper sulfate or neem oil, which are highly toxic to people and wildlife. They’re also less effective against pests, so they have to use more of them.
Modern pesticides are among the most carefully tested and regulated chemicals in use, and they are used increasingly in targeted, precise ways to limit wider environmental impacts.
Most importantly, modern farming allows us to produce more food on less land. According to Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel, US corn production has quintupled on the same amount of land.
He estimates that if American farming techniques were to be adopted globally, an area the size of India could be returned to nature over the next 50 years.
“Better Living Through Chemistry” was the catchy DuPont slogan of the 1960s. The slogan rings true for those of us living longer, healthier lives of plenty, with more food than at any time in human history.
But if the campaigns against chemicals and the demonization of modern agriculture are successful, these gains may well be reversed.
Perhaps that’s the plan. Radical environmentalists have maintained that human beings are the problem. “Fewer Living Without Chemistry” might as well be the slogan of the modern environmentalist movement.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/radical-enviros-africa-locust-problem/
For some reason the Telegraph report forgot to mention any of this.
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January 30, 2020 at 05:18AM
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