IRIN Focus on locust infestation in north

Farmer Wali Jan shook his head in dismay as he watched swarms of locusts rise from his land in the northern Baghlan Province. “My entire crop has been destroyed by them. What am I going to do?” he lamented. Jan told IRIN he had used up all his seed and fertiliser on his 15 acres in the provincial capital of Pol-e Khomri, and had 16 family members to feed. He said they had resorted to begging in the local market and were living off gleanings wheat from other farmers’ fields, which had escaped infestation. He said he had no means of controlling the pest, as there were just too many of them. Locust infestation in northern Afghanistan has been “particularly bad” this year due to the ongoing severe drought, the worst in 30 years, UN officials told IRIN. “Thousands of hectares of land were destroyed, leaving many farmers without food for the next few months,” Ghulam Hassan, WFP’s senior assistant in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif said. He added that the locust problem had always existed, but efforts by international agencies had been diverted to aid distribution, in response to huge food shortages in the war-torn region. UN officials said the perennial problem had been exacerbated by the dry weather, and the response had not been quick enough. The WFP regional public affairs officer, Khaled Mansour, told IRIN that “the programme was a little late, but we could not put resources in at the time”. The insects usually confine themselves to desert land between Kunduz and Baghlan, but the dry weather at the start of the year prompted them to migrate into the northern provinces in search of food. Billions of eggs hatched in March, and the locusts stayed in the area to feed off the fields. According to aid workers, more than half the agricultural land was infested in some provinces. To make matters worse this year, due to lack of seed and water brought about by the three-year drought, farmers had only planted half the land they would normally have cultivated. Moreover, many of them had enhanced their vulnerability by extending the boundaries of the land they cultivated to the edge of the desert areas already infested by locusts, Hassan said. In March, with the help of national and international NGOs, WFP carried out a food-for-work programme to eliminate locusts in the northern region. Some 8,000 Afghan labourers worked in fields for a month, collecting locusts and burying them in ditches. This labour-intensive method was chosen as an alternative to spraying crops with chemicals, which were potentially harmful to the population. A total of 110,586 hectares were covered by the programme in the Baghlan, Samangan and Kunduz provinces, and five kilogrammes of wheat were distributed to the workers for each hectare cleared. “There is lots of manpower, so this was the best option,” Mansour said. He maintained that WFP’s aim was to employ the local community in the interest of the farmers. “Afghanistan is not a country where farmers can be left to their own devices; they can’t do it alone,” he said, adding that they were hoping to repeat the programme next year to avert “a serious disaster” for the farming community. However, WFP said the problem was far from over. “There are still pockets of locusts. It is impossible to get rid of them all,” Hassan explained. This was evident in Baghlan, where only 40 percent of the locusts had been destroyed, leaving many farmers short of food. It has been predicted that the problem will be even worse next year, with fears of about 70 percent of land in Baghlan becoming infested. Hassan said billions of eggs had been laid, which were due to hatch next March, threatening to bring about an even more disastrous harvest in the summer. WFP officials say locusts lay pods, each containing about 50 eggs, and that 450 pods were found on every square metre of land this year. Hassan said it was easier to kill locusts soon after hatching when they were still wingless and unable to move fast. Back in Pol-e Khomri, farmer Wali Jan has dug up his land and is now trying to grow rice, which will be ready for harvesting in a couple of months’ time. He said if this crop failed, he and his family would have no other means of feeding themselves. “It is going to take at least five to six years for the farmers to have a normal crop again,” Hassan said. The last time farmers in Afghanistan were self-sufficient was in 1979 before the ongoing civil war devastated the strict Islamic nation.