Madagascar battles locust swarms to save rice and maize crops

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/31/madagascar-locusts-rice-food-security

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A pair of farmers in Madagascar are struggling to drive off hundreds of thousands of locusts heading for their rice plantation, equipped with no more than a branch and a plastic bag. "It's the third time in a month that these bugs have come near here and I'm terrified we may lose everything," says Razafindradaoro.

For this father of four, salvation could come from the heavens. Flying about 10 metres above the ground, a helicopter will soon be spraying insecticide in the area around Tsiroanomandidy, in central Madagascar, to eradicate the centimetre-long larvae that are destroying the crops.

Some 35,000 hectares have been treated since November. Over the next year it is hoped to cover 1m hectares. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the government of Madagascar are spending $41.5m on this three-year programme to combat locusts; it aims to stamp out the pests currently affecting 17 out of 22 of the island's regions.

In October the FAO and the World Food Programme raised the alarm, with almost 4 million people in rural areas already hit by food insecurity. "The rice harvest – the staple for people here – is 20% lower than last year," says Alexandre Huynh, FAO emergency and rehabilitation co-ordinator in Madagascar. "It's difficult to determine the locusts' impact exactly, because the drop in output is also due to difficult weather conditions, but in some regions they have destroyed everything."

Weighing two to three grams, the Malagasy migratory locust eats three times its own weight in a day. A small swarm of 1 million locusts devours up to nine tonnes of organic matter per day.

Farming two hectares of rice and five of maize, Zoemboasi is not likely to forget a fateful day in February. "The locusts turned up at dawn, a cloud 5km long and 3km wide. In just five minutes most of my crops were wrecked," he says. Instead of harvesting seven tonnes of rice as usual, there were only two left in April. "It was my worst year in the past 20 years," he adds. "I hope that pest-control chopper will come through here."

To prevent the pest from spreading, the FAO is trying to intervene upstream, when the locusts are just larvae or hoppers. "We carry out a barrier treatment: in other words, we spray blocks of vegetation at 500-metre intervals. The larvae eat [the blocks] and are poisoned, no longer able to reproduce," says Tsitohaina Andriamaroahina, an FAO expert. "In this way by treating only one hectare, we can protect five, which cuts costs, but you have to be careful because the hoppers are constantly on the move."

To indicate the exact position of the hopper bands to the helicopter pilot, a locust specialist and accompanying team cover as much as 2,000 to 3,000km a month, after identifying on maps the corridors where the humidity lends itself to locust development.

Two 4x4 vehicles go out on patrol. After driving down tracks for two hours, they stop. Ahead a hopper band was crossing their path. Holding a GPS receiver, a man in a navy-blue suit walked round the hopper colony. "That makes 15,000 square metres, with 200 specimens per square metre," he said.

Further down the track a local resident brandishing a sickle stopped the convoy. "There are some over there," he shouted, pointing northwards. One and a half kilometres further on another swarm came in sight. "The villagers' help is valuable, but sometimes they deliberately give us misleading directions because they're afraid of strangers or think we may destroy their crops," Andriamaroahina explains. "The other difficulty in our work is insecurity: we can't enter the red zones in the south of the country, where the zebu (oxen) thieves are armed."

If sufficient funds can be found for the three-year programme (currently $15m short of a total $41.5m), the locusts will once more be contained in their traditional habitat, in the south of Madagascar.

"Looking to the longer term, preventive work will be needed to stop the locust population expanding too much and migrating as soon as the weather conditions are favourable," Huynh says. "We wouldn't be spending so much now if about 100,000 hectares had been treated preventively in previous years, 10 times less than the area we're having to treat now."

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde

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