SONS OF MALCOLM: (this is literal) GADAFI HELD BACK THE LOCUSTS WHICH ARE DEVASTATING AFRICA

See on Scoop.it - Saif al Islam

“The death of Muammar Gaddafi continues to reverberate across Africa – this time in the form of desert locusts.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations warned on Tuesday that croplands in Niger and Mali were at imminent risk from locust swarms moving south from Libya and Algeria.

The revolution in Libya played a major role in allowing the pests to breed, it said.

“The fall of Gaddafi was an enormous factor, to be honest,” said Keith Cressman, FAO senior locust forecasting officer. “It depleted the Libyans’ capacity to monitor and respond as they normally would.”

Insecurity along the Libya-Algeria border – a fallout from the uprising – meant that teams are still unable to properly spray the affected areas.

Desert locusts have the capacity to destroy vast areas of croplands. During a plague, a swarm can stretch for several hundred square kilometres comprising billions of locusts, each capable of eating its own weight in food a day.

See on sonsofmalcolm.blogspot.co.uk