More than 10 million people affected by food insecurity are under threat, says the UN. The world body’s humanitarian chief, Mark Lowcock, says the insects appear 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.”
(Rick Moran – PJ Media) Billions of locusts are swarming across East Africa, eating everything in sight and threatening to cause starvation in a region already affected by extreme hunger.
The United Nations says the region “simply cannot afford another major shock.” The locusts have been destroying crops in Kenya after chewing up crops in Somalia and Ethiopia — arguably two of the most desperate nations for food on earth.
Now the “waves and waves of swarms” are spreading further across the region, said Keith Cressman, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) senior locust forecasting officer.
“Also over the weekend they moved into northeastern Uganda,” he told a news conference at U.N. headquarters in New York. “We’re expecting any day they will move across the border into the southeast corner of South Sudan,” where another several million people face hunger as the country struggles to emerge from civil war.