ITALY / SENEGAL: United Nation's FAO organisation use latest technology to combat locusts

Record ID: 456402

  • Title: ITALY / SENEGAL: United Nation's FAO organisation use latest technology to combat locusts
  • Date: 17th November 2006
  • Summary: SATELLITE MAP CRESSMAN WATCHING MAURITANIA SATELLITE MAP
  • Embargoed: 2nd December 2006 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Health
  • Reuters ID: LVA23I507D8VKV6HUASLR8YJFDI0
  • Story Text: The United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) is using the latest satellite and computer technology in its fight against a fearless enemy - the desert locust.
    For over 10, 000 years farmers have tried and failed to repel these insects and little has been understood about why the locust, normally a loner, occasionally form into vast, voracious swarms that leave hunger and poverty behind them.
    "Certainly the most significant and the most recent improvement is that of a system that has been designed for the people working in the field, for these people that are making the surveys and are undertaking the control operations," Keith Cressman, FAO'S Locust Survey and Forecasting Officer told Reuters at the headquarters in Rome.
    "This system is a small hand-held device called 'E Locust 2', that allows these people to enter the data into this device and then to send it via satellite to the decision-makers in their country, at the national level, and also to this office here in Rome. We get all of this data within five minutes or ten minutes, and we can see exactly what the situation is on the ground as it has been reported by these locust officers on the field," Cressman explainedd adding the system has been in use for only a few months.
    With up to the minute information combined with data from several different sources FAO expects reaction time to any potential formation of a devastating locust swarm to be almost immediate.
    "This data is analysed using sophisticated geographical information systems on computers, that allows us to combine the data with historical information, with meteorological data, with wind data, satellite information, to first understand the current situation and to predict how it will develop in the future," Cressman added.
    Desert locusts breed rapidly, maturing in just three weeks, and are capable of travelling up to 100km (60 miles) a day. They can eat their own weight in food every day, which means a single swarm can consume as much food as several thousand people.
    The last devastating swarm to hit Africa was in 2004 which swept across the north and west of the continent leaving 60 percent of Mauritania's population - 400,000 people - needing food aid. And FAO has recently tracked the appearance of juvenile locusts or hoppers in the area once again.
    "At the moment we are taking the situation in Mauritania very seriously. So far, no locust swarms have formed, but there would be a possibility of some small swarms forming if there is good rainfall let's say, during the month of November until early December... We don't think that at this point that it would move to other countries further North, North-West Africa and certainly would not move South into the Sahel of Africa" Cressman indicated.
    Tests carried out in Nairobi, Kenya recently have identified a specific locust pheromone -- a chemical signal produced by the locusts that governs their swarming behaviour. Incorporated into a spray Phenylacetonitrile (PAN) the insects resume to solitary behaviour stopping swarms dead in their tracks. FAO are hopeful that this relatively cheap solution to stop swarms forming could turn around Africa's history with the locust.
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