By Ibrahima Sylla
Nouakchott - Nearly a million people in West Africa face famine unless they get international aid to battle swarms of locusts devouring their crops in the region's worst plague in 15 years, farmers and government experts warned.
The locusts are sweeping into crop-growing areas of the Sahel, on the Sahara's southern fringe, a region whose people are mostly subsistence farmers and whose governments lack the means to fight the infestation.
A fraction of a swarm can eat the same amount in a day as 10 elephants, 25 camels or about 2 500 people, experts say, destroying subsistence crops such as sorghum and millet as well as money earners like water melons and groundnuts.
"We have to expect a deficit in our cereal crop of around 80 percent. What's more, 600 000 to 800 000 people will be affected by famine," Mohamed Lemine, an official from Mauritania's national agriculture federation, told reporters late on Saturday.
"If steps are not taken we can't hope for any harvest this year," another senior federation official said.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warned as long ago as October that locust swarms threatened to wreak havoc on the region after exceptional rains and humidity following several years of drought allowed the insects to flourish.
But the response has fallen woefully short. The FAO said two weeks ago that damage from the airborne invasion could triple to $245 million within a year if no emergency aid is provided soon.
It put immediate aid needs at $80-million and said just $9-million had been pledged so far.
Mauritania and Niger both say they need up to $20-million, extra aircraft to spray crops, and hundreds of thousands more litres of pesticide to contain the plague.
The last major plague in 1987-89 started in western Sudan, but hit 28 nations and spread as far as India, meaning even countries not yet infested are preparing for the worst.
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