Swarms of desert locusts have damaged 500,000 acres of cropland in Ethiopia, leaving a million people needing emergency food aid, according to the United Nations.
The results from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) come as the region is preparing for new swarms that could cause more destruction.
The locusts have caused widespread losses of wheat, maize, sorghum, and reduced the amount of available land for cattle grazing, according to FAO.
Billions of locusts have already eaten their way through East Africa, including Sudan, Uganda, South Sudan, Somalia, Tanzania, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
One of the wettest rainy seasons in the region in forty years has spurred their breeding.
75 percent of people in Ethiopia who require emergency food assistance live in Oromia and Somali regions.
Fatouma Seid, a FAO Ethiopia representative, said pastoralists and farmers needed help in the form of cash transfers and agricultural inputs to get them through the issue amid the coronavirus crisis.
“It is critical to protect the livelihoods of the affected population especially now that the situation is compounded by the COVID-19 crisis,” Seid said.
As of April 14, there are 74 confirmed cases in Ethiopia with three fatalities. Because testing has been limited, experts fear the region’s health system could be overwhelmed by the real number of cases.
FAO warned last week that a ‘massive increase’ in locusts across the region would pose “an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods.”
Billions of locusts keep on coming in, threatening ‘total destruction’ of farmland and crops. Many African communities regard the locusts as a greater threat than the COVID-19 pandemic.
One internet user commented: “I’m in the middle east, one day I woke up and you couldn’t see the sky because of them! Apparently the wind brought them East after they’d been in Sudan.”
Another wrote: “The world is definitely experiencing the four horsemen of the apocalypse right now.”
A third added: “Im not religious but pestilence, war, famine, and death are very apparent at the moment.”
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Replaced!