By Victoria Engstrand-Neacsu, dpa
Nairobi (dpa) - In scenes reminiscent of the plagues out of the Bible, massive swarms of the locusts have been descending on large parts of West Africa in recent weeks.
Locusts swarms are now reported as far west as the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, as far south as Nigeria, and as far east as Chad in central Africa - in all, an area the size of continental Europe.
The country worst hit is Mauritania, where locusts have eaten up to 80 per cent of the harvest, leaving one million people in need of food aid.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) this week said that unless a new generation of insects developing in the semi-deserts of southern Mauritania is sprayed with insecticide quickly, mature locusts will take to the skies in the coming weeks to further devastate the region.
Meanwhile the FAO reported that northeasterly winds had blown several locust swarms out over the water to the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic.
The swarms contained up to 50 insects per square metre. Many of them, tired from the 450-kilometre flight over open water, were found dead on the beaches.
Locusts are finger-length insects similar to grasshoppers that travel in swarms, devouring plants and crops in their path. A single locust can eat its own weight (2 grams) in a day. A small portion of a swarm easily eats the same amount of food in a day as 2,500 adult humans, making the amount of damage done by billions of insects almost unimaginable.
Plagues of locusts have been reported since pharaonic times in Egypt. Stories in the Bible tell of swarms blocking out the sun and turning day into night.
The FAO offers some frightening numbers for modern times, saying that desert locusts have the potential to spread over 29 million square kilometres - 20 per cent of Earth's total land surface.
And as proved by the arrivals on the Cape Verde archipelago, locusts are good at staying airborne, often crossing the 300-kilometre wide Red Sea and recording some spectacular flights, such as from West Africa to the Caribbean, and from northwest Africa to Britain in 1954.
On Thursday, officials in Nigeria said swarms of locusts had flown into three states in the northwest of the country and were causing severe damage to crops.
"Only Allah can tell if there will be any harvest,'' one state government official said.
In affected areas in Senegal, swarms of up to 80 million locusts were reportedly ranging over each square kilometre.
Earlier this month, the U.N. said swarms had began moving into Chad, giving rise to fears the insects may also invade the Sudanese region of Darfur further east, where two million people are already weak from hunger and disease resulting from the political conflict there.
Following a trip to affected countries this week, FAO director Jacques Diouf appealed for 100 million dollars to help governments in the region - often too poor to cope on their own - control the locust plague.
Diouf warned that without swift action several countries could face famine, which would bring the costs much higher.
"If we delay, we will be faced with the situation we experienced 15 years ago when 600 million dollars had to be devoted against locusts over a period of five years,'' Diouf said. dpa ve mga