East Africa deploys huge volumes of ‘highly hazardous’ pesticides
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against locust plague
SWARMS of locusts tens of kilometers wide have threatened to devastate crops in East Africa since late 2019, putting some 32 million people at risk of going hungry.
By Leopold Salzenstein
The desert locust infestation, described by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2020 as a “scourge of biblical proportions,” is the worst the region has seen in decades, according to humanitarian groups. In Ethiopia, the triple threat of locusts, floods and Covid-19 threatened to tip the region into a humanitarian crisis.
To combat the emergency, governments have resorted to spraying large tracts of land with some 2 million liters of insecticides over almost 2 million hectares (5 million acres), since the beginning of the outbreak in December 2019, prompting concerns over the potential health and environmental impacts.