Aidan Hartley Aidan Hartley

Another plague is enveloping the world – locusts

Soon we will see individual swarms the size of London

A swarm of locusts in Isiolo County, eastern Kenya (Getty Images)

As if 2020 hasn’t already scared the hell out of us all, a plague of locusts is upon us. When I first witnessed a swarm swirling across my farm in Kenya, it was hard to see them in the nightmarish way they’re depicted in Exodus or the Book of Revelation. They were millions of pink and golden Tinker Bell fairies, flying in a halo around the sun, filling the air with the sound of rustling skirts. But the breeding cycle of a locust is only a few months and they are growing in numbers exponentially. Soon, it’s predicted, we will see individual swarms equivalent to the size of London, each of which consumes as much food as half the population of the United Kingdom on a daily basis. In a variation on the theme of Covid-19, how this year of the locust arrived is a story of bad luck, human folly and cack-handedness — with ghastly consequences.

Like diseases, locust plagues have been a regular cause of famine in history. Last century there were some enormous outbreaks that spread across different parts of the world, inflicting widespread hunger. In 1954, swarms from Africa reached England and in 1988 even made landfall in the West Indies. Concerted international action in the post-war years progressively brought the problem under control and, as a boy in 1960s East Africa, I recall desert locust control officers were as common as traffic wardens. Their job was to roam the wilderness, monitoring solitary grasshoppers that every few years, on a pheromonic signal triggered by unusually heavy rainfall, suddenly began congregating in ever larger bands to lay their eggs in wet, sandy riverbeds. After hatching, the flightless hoppers would begin massing — at which point locust control teams flattened them all with poisonous sprays. In the decades following the end of empire, locust swarms were rarely seen, existing mainly as a story of the bad old days before clever scientists came to the rescue.

In late 2018, locusts began multiplying in Oman’s Empty Quarter desert, following heavy rains from the super-sized Cyclone Luban.

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