FOOD DISASTER : LOCUST EAST AFRICA ATTACK

NAIROBI : Billions of locusts swarming through East Africa are the result of extreme weather swings and could prove catastrophic for a region still reeling from drought and deadly floods, experts said on Friday.

Dense clouds of the ravenous insects have spread from Ethiopia and Somalia into Kenya, in the region's worse infestation in decades.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation [FAO] estimated one swarm in Kenya at around 2,400 square kilometres [ about 930 square miles ] an area almost the size of Moscow-meaning it could contain up to 200 billion locusts, each of which consume their own weight in food every day.

The locust invasion is the biggest in Ethiopia and Somalia in 25 years, and the biggest in Kenya in 70 years, according to the FAO.

If unchecked, locust numbers could grow 500 times by June, spreading to Uganda and South Sudan, becoming a plague that will devastate crops and pasture in a region which is already one of the poorest and most vulnerable in the world.

This could lead to ''a major food security problem'', Guleid Artan from regional expert the Climate Prediction and Applications Centre [ICPAC], told a press conference in Nairobi.

The locusts, he said, were the latest symptom of extreme conditions that saw 2019 start with a drought and end in one of the wettest rainy seasons in four decades in some parts - with floods killing hundreds across East Africa.

The FAO says the current invasion is known as an ''upsurge'' - when an entire region is affected -however, if it gets worse and cannot be contained, over a year or more, it would become what is known as a ''plague'' of locusts.

There have been six major desert locust plagues in the 1900s, the last of which was in 1987-89. The last major upsurge was in 2003 - 05.

Artan said the invasion had come after a year of extremes which included eight cyclones off East Africa, the most in a single year since 1976. [AFP]