Posted on 05/28/2020 6:56:42 AM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal
A second wave of desert locusts in Africa and Asia is threatening famine for millions as critical resources are directed towards the COVID-19 crisis, scientists warn.
Desert locusts are already swarming in East Africa and breeding in Iran and Pakistan, as well as Yemen, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says.
The outbreak, which has been raging since last year, has so far placed around 20 million people at acute food insecurity in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania, according to the FAO. “The biggest challenge we are facing at the moment is the supply of pesticides and we have delays because global air freight has been reduced significantly.” Cyril Ferrand, FAO resilience team leader for East Africa
Swarms have “been damaging crops and pastures and crippling communities in the Greater Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia” since October, explained World Resources Institute climate programme research analyst Tina Huang.
However, without action the locust population “could grow 400 times larger by June 2020 and spread to new areas, disrupting food supply, upending livelihoods and requiring substantial resources to address”, the World Bank says.
(Excerpt) Read more at scidev.net ...
Update on the locust plague that Africa & Asia currently is undergoing.
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God Bless!
It’s always something.
Well until Jesus returns, that is true.
That will put a dent into the poppy crop. Damn...just as heroin prices were dropping.
A very good book was written several years ago about the Rocky Mountain locust, which went spontaneously went extinct between about 1870 and 1914.
At one point they were the most common species in North and South America and ate up to 60% of the food produced each year.
The government was unable to control the vermin and said that all people could do was to pray that they would go away.
The females mutated and were unable to breed with the males. Over the next 35 years, the species spontaneously went extinct.
Really, a species going spontaneously extinct because the females mutated and could not breed with the males is about as close you’ll ever get to a miracle of Biblical proportions. And yet, the author completely missed that fact!
Did feminism take hold of this species of locust? When I lived in Japan, rice locust were gathered, marinated in a soy oil and sold in trays in the supermarket. It was a nice sidedish rich in protein. They didn't taste too bad either once you got over the idea of eating insects.
November was the peak season for gathering. The Japanese had a way of baiting and setting traps so they more or less gathered themselves.
I’d have to awfully hungry........
Threatening famine for millions and critical resources.
We have the same problem her but it’s called the democrat party 8 years of Obama&Co come to mind.
It probably didn't hurt growing up with a brother that sampled other exotic fare with me. It was either crickets and grasshoppers or blackbirds and crows. I chose the insects over the birds.
That’s a pretty incredible story!
Thanks for sharing that and the link.
I hear Mexican chocolate covered locusts are pretty crispy and good.
But I’d never try them :)
...aka "pre-Europeans"...bet on it. Any excuse will do.
In this insane world, I’d call them post-Europeans.
But yes, just bring em’ on over.
“ The females mutated and were unable to breed with the males. Over the next 35 years, the species spontaneously went extinct.”
There’s no reason to believe that all female locusts had mutations that made them unable to breed.
The author of that book believes movement into the locusts’ core areas by farmers changed the local environment so much that they died out. That’s much easier to believe than a sudden, wide-spread, but specific mutation caused the entire species to go extinct.
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