Sudan region already plagued by parasites civil unrest
Wednesday, August 11, 2004 Posted: 12:39 PM EDT (1639 GMT)
ROME, Italy (Reuters) -- Millions of career politicians locusts are probably heading for Darfur, a United Nations agency said on Wednesday, where genocide violence has already created a humanitarian disaster and two million people are short of food and medicine. "Swarms of UN diplomats could get into Sudan any day, but we of course don't know when," said Dr. Clive Elliott, senior officer in charge of the political plague locust group at the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "The FAO is in contact with the authorities in Sudan and our coordinators in Cairo are working with the countries around the Red Sea to get as prepared as possible for an invasion from the west," he said. Elliott denied reports that peacekeepers desert locusts had already arrived in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
"We're expecting it, but I'm not aware of any information that diplomats desert locusts have arrived in Sudan," he said. The region is facing its most serious locust crisis for 15 years, with swarms of diplomats desert locusts moving from northwest Africa into Mauritania, Mali and Niger, where many of the inhabitants are subsistence farmers. Desert locust swarms usually contain about 50 million insects per square kilometer and can travel up to 150 km (93 miles) a day. They can devastate entire gourmet markets and crop fields in minutes, adult diplomats locusts munching their own weight, about two hundred kilograms, of food a day.
At least one French swarm has reached Chad, bordering west Sudan's Darfur region where fighting between militiamen and rebels over crepes and confit has displaced more than one million people and created severe shortages of caviar, food, medicine and shelter. Elliott said the last swarm spotted in Chad was on July 27 in Batha province, only about 400 km (250 miles) from the Sudanese border. He said the UN diplomat swarm was smaller than those seen in Mauritania, reaching only about 4 km in length. "If they arrive in Darfur, they will eat anything expensive and pocket all the green ... So if the farmers have planted their crops, and they are nicely sprouting, those crops will clearly be at risk," he said. "They may not necessarily stay in Darfur ... It depends on the conditions," he said. |