A huge swarm of locusts hit east African nations for the second time this year making the situation for the region, which is already battling hunger crisis and coronavirus COVID-19 scare, very critical, a report by BBC News informed.
The swarms are likely to be 20 times bigger than the first invasion and by June it could become atleast 400 times larger, according to a projection by UN. These batches of younger, freshly-hatched locusts are more aggressive and is creating havoc destroying crops and vegetation alike.
Nations like Ethiopia, Kenya and Somialia have been the worst-hit in this pest attack.
An Ethiopian government official Meseret Hailu, who witnessed the devastation caused by the locust swarms in his country, recounted that the crop-devouring pests were found everywhere "on bushes, on pasture, irrigation plantations, even in forests" of the country's northern Amhara region.
Governments have been scrambling for pesticides and large scale fumigation efforts for the insect invasion which is said to the biggest one in the last 25 years. But the onslaught of coronavirus has made efforts either non existential due to the unavailability of required item or very at very expensive rates.
"The scale-up of the operation has been the biggest difficulty," said Cyrill Ferrand from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) was quoted as saying by BBC.
India and Pakistan too had been monitoring the movement of the insects before the COVID-19 pandemic brought the entire world to its knees.
Pakistan was invaded by the locust swarm in the months of November and December in 2019, which proceeded to lay waste to the country's cotton crop and ruined wheat harvest as well.
While in India, crops in around 10 kilometres of area at Banaskantha district of Gujarat was destroyed by the locusts which entered the area after making its through Rajasthan from Pakistan.
