United Nations has on Monday said swarms of locusts in Ethiopia have damaged 500,000 acres of cropland, causing almost a million people to require emergency food aid.
These findings discovered by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) during a recently concluded joint assessment with the Ethiopian government, comes as the region is bracing for new swarms that could be even more destructive.
This comes as Coronavirus cases in Ethiopia rises to 82 cases on Tuesday morning with with 3 deaths.
Billions of desert locusts have already eaten their way through much of East Africa, including Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, Eritrea, Tanzania, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda, Metro UK reports.
Their breeding has been spurred by one of the wettest rainy seasons in the region in four decades.
FAO said in Ethiopia, the locusts have caused widespread losses of sorghum, wheat and maize, also known as corn, and vastly reduced the amount of available land for cattle grazing.
It added that about 75 percent of Ethiopians requiring emergency food assistance live in the country’s Somali and Oromia regions.
FAO Ethiopia representative Fatouma Seid stated that farmer and pastoralists needed help in the form of agricultural inputs and cash transfers to get them through the emergency, which was being worsened by the coronavirus pandemic.
Seid said;
It is critical to protect the livelihoods of the affected population, especially now that the situation is compounded by the Covid-19 crisis.
Metro UK reports that Coronavirus testing has been limited and experts fear the country’s weak health system, like others in the region, could be quickly overwhelmed by an influx of cases.
Meanwhile, the locust situation is likely to get worse, as the FAO warns a ‘massive increase’ in locusts across the region would pose ‘an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods’ by endangering the upcoming planting and harvest seasons.
