This archive report was first published on 23 June 2020.
Published on June 23, 2020, East Africa is bracing for a third outbreak of desert locusts, with billions of the destructive insects about to hatch and threaten food supplies in a region already reeling from damaging rains and the coronavirus pandemic.
Spurred by favourable weather conditions, the migratory pests have descended on East Africa in record numbers since late 2019, with the International Rescue Committee estimating that tens of thousands of hectares of cropland and pasture have already been damaged across the Horn and East Africa.
"Even a small swarm could devour the same amount of food in a day as approximately 35,000 people," the International Rescue Committee noted in a report this month.
Locusts destroyed 1.3 million hectares of grazing land and nearly 200,000 hectares of crops in Ethiopia between January and April, resulting in the loss of 350,000 tonnes of cereals, according to IGAD, the East Africa regional organisation.
However, these initial estimates do not fully capture the extent of damage as field surveys have been hindered by the coronavirus pandemic.
"Until we get extended figures, I would just say Ethiopia was definitely the most affected in terms of croplands, then Somalia," says Kenneth Kemucie Mwangi from ICPAC, the climate monitoring programme of IGAD.
So far East African neighbours Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi have been spared the insects, which travel in huge swarms billions of insects strong, and can migrate 150 kilometres (90 miles) in a single day.
The World Bank in May approved a $500 million (445 million euro) programme to help countries vulnerable to hunger in East Africa fight the pests eating their way across the region.
Despite concerted efforts to control the locusts, including pesticide spraying operations that have helped wipe out staggering numbers of the insects, a third wave is predicted to hatch in coming weeks, just as farmers take to the fields.
"We have concerns for the June-July harvest," said Lark Walters of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a US-funded food security monitoring organisation.
