Locust swarms start arriving in West Africa

Locust swarms start arriving in West Africa

New reports indicate that Desert Locust swarms are moving out of the spring breeding areas in Northwest Africa and arriving in the summer breeding areas in the Sahel, West Africa...Summer rains have started in some areas which will allow the locusts to mature and lay eggs in the coming weeks...International assistance is desperately required to supplement major efforts already underway and to prevent the situation from deteriorating further.

Pictures of the developing locust swarms

There are also early signs of flooding, as indicated by the photo above of the Moroccan flood. Given how early in the rainy season this flooding is appearing, this suggests that in addition to crop losses to locusts, there may be a repeat of last years record breaking rains, and crop losses due to flooding. Satellite imagery also shows the same pattern as last year, as monsoons push clouds up from the Sahel and into the Sahara Desert, which once again might push the severe heat of the Sahara into Europe this summer. (Links from last year - Changing Climate on the Sahara brings flooding in countries along Southern Border Increasing rainfall is bringing about the retreat of the Sahara desert, and the transitional period is bringing increasing rains every year, and in 2003 brought severe flooding...Sahara storm system threatens Africa with famine As torrential rains poured down on the Southern Desert region of the Sahara, rivers were carrying eight times as much water as normal, and were within one inch of bursting their banks. And then another huge storm system began brewing, which would have destroyed irrigation supported subsistence agriculture which is the lifeblood of millions of people in the region.

Meanwhile the FAO is desperate for money to fight locusts. This is typical of FAO appeals for money, and whether it is for fighting famine, or fighting locusts, the appeals always come up short, thus treating the world to the terrible pictures of millions of famine victims sitting down in the dust to die. Typically, it would take around six months of pressure to get the images of the famine victims onto the news broadcasts (if the Ethiopian famine of a previous decade is any indication). It is also worth noting that the Rock Concert (Live Aid) only raised enough money to pay the interest on the debt of Subsaharan nations for about 20 hours (less than a full day). The total debt load of the world's most heavily indebted poor nations amounts to about one fifth of the total United States tax cut package (and given that this tax cut agenda has gone global, only represents an even smaller fraction of the total world tax cuts. One should also keep in mind that the current American tax cuts, going mostly to the very rich, are larger than the previous Reagan tax cuts, and that these earlier tax cuts transferred close to 11 trillion dollars to the top percentile around the world in the following two decades, and never before has the global income gap been so large, and now about to become even larger. The total debt of the most Heavily Indebted Poor Countries only comes to between 2 and 3 per cent of this total transfer of income. Even the debt of countries such as Brazil are included, the total debt load of poorer nations is still only a fraction of this total 11 trillion dollars transferred. I feel this is worth mentioning, in case anyone says 'we don't have the money' or in case anyone wants to hold a rock concert for the terrible famine, and pay the interest for half a day. The question here is whether the needs of the few outweight the needs of the many ...As George Bush sarcastically referred to his tax cut package, it was targetted to the 'haves and the have mores.' This is an accurate, if snide description, of his tax policy. (As he told them, in the now famous clip in the Michael Moore film, 'some people call you the elite, but I call you my base.')

The desperate lack of funding for this locust appeal by the FAO is very short sighted, given that, combined with the flooding caused by climate change, will spread famine all over the continent (much worse scenario than the famines contained in such places as Ethiopia), and locust plagues, once they begin, can cover up to one fifth of the earth (as far East as the Indian subcontinent). The total cost will be much more than the few million needed to fight locusts.


It is also important to note that when people are more prosperous, they have less babies (indeed in Europe, and other richer nations, there is a negative birth rate). The reason why people in poor nations have more kids is that this is a form of social security, in that kids can then take care of their parents in old age (for example if you get one potatoe from one kid, another from another kid, you are less a burden on your kids who are also poor). When poverty is reduced, so is the birth rate. However for the last twenty years, poverty has increased greatly under the right wing Reagan Thatcher Bush agenda, resulting in the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer, and the transfer of wealth to Bush's base (the 'have mores') continues, the needs of the very few being put before the needs of the very many (how someone can be so crude as to joke about something like that and consider this funny is a good question, but the one good thing about Bush is that he throws right in your face the real face of the powers that be, and doesn't do as others do and try to hide and disguise it). On top of the effects of poverty, you can add on the further assaults of the religious right, and their world wide assault on birth control and you have the makings of a disaster.

It is also worth noting that the poorest people in the world use only a fraction of the world's resources, whereas, take Americans for example, who comprise 5 per cent of the world's population, and use on average one third of the world's resources (the logical outcome of the American obssession with the irrational notion of permanent, never ending growth - even though such a thing is a mathematical impossibility). Even the Europeans don't use energy or water or other resources in the profligate way that American's use these things, and you don't hear about how hard up, or what a bad life Europeans have as a result. Now we find that the glaciers that supply the only source of drinking water for millions of impoverished people in Latin America will be gone in, at most, about twenty years, and in Northern AFrica, the results of the changing climate are once again falling on the poorest people in the world, who, while they enjoy none of the benefits of creating global warming, have to deal with the consequences (although the ongoing desertification of western America demonstates that neither do Americans escape the consequences for what happens to the planet). One must also ask why it is the case that over the last century Washington D.C. has stuck to a pro-poverty policy (every single coup d'etat in which Washington installed and propped up right wing dictators was preceded by a poverty reduction program, just as is now happening in Venezuela, and where, once again, Washington is arranging the overthrow of the government). At least Bush spelled it out for everyone, in that everything Washington does it does so that the haves can have more, as Bush so tastefully put it, with his characteristic humor. What I am suggesting here is that there is responsibility which exists here, given that people are being forced, by military force and dictatorships, to be poor, and then no doubt will be forced to starve or die of thirst (the only important thing being to protect Bush's all so important 'have mores' from the unwashed mobs of 'have nots' who are have nots because Washington's pro-poverty policies have forcibily made them into have nots and is also determined to use continued force to see to it that they remain have nots...