“The world needs to know this is where it all begins,” said a spokesman for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Alberto Trillo Barca. PHOTOS: AP Young desert locusts crowd together on a rock in the desert near GaroweĪs an armed Somali policeman stood by, experts recently walked across the dry land crawling with the young locusts and explained the threat to come if the world doesn’t act right now. A young desert locust that has not yet grown wings is stuck in a spider’s web on a thorny bush in the desert near Garowe, in the semi-autonomous Puntland region of Somalia. Across the region, it has the potential “to be the most devastating plague of locusts in any of our living memories if we don’t reduce the problem faster than we’re doing at the moment,” United Nations (UN) humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock said. Somalia has declared the outbreak a national emergency. That makes it difficult or impossible to conduct the aerial spraying of the locusts that experts say is the only effective control. Large parts of Somalia south of this semi-autonomous Puntland region are under threat, or held by, the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab extremist group. Small and wingless, the hopping young locusts are the next wave in the outbreak that threatens more than 10 million people across the region with a severe hunger crisis.Īnd they are growing up in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet.
GAROWE, SOMALIA (AP) - At a glance, the desert locusts in this arid patch of northern Somalia look less ominous than the billion-member swarms infesting East Africa in the worst outbreak some places have seen in 70 years.