India recently witnessed invasion of vast swathes of land by swarms of desert locusts, which entered India from the western side via Pakistan’s Sindh province. The desert locusts usually breed in areas in the countries along the eastern coast of Africa in a region known as the Horn of Africa.

The reasons for these locust attacks are

• Indian Ocean Dipole: Positive Indian Ocean dipole made the western Indian Ocean particularly warm and consequently led to greater precipitation.
  • Heavy rain (wettest rainfall season in over four decades in East Africa) triggered the growth of vegetation in arid areas where desert locusts could grow and breed.
• Cyclones: The cyclonic storms Mekunu and Luban that struck Oman and Yemen in 2018 respectively transformed the empty desert tracts into large lakes providing damp soils where the locust swarms bred.
• Wind Movement: Locusts generally are known to be passive flyers, who generally follow the wind. The low-pressure area created by Cyclone Amphan in the Bay of Bengal strengthened the westerly winds, which aided the movement of the locusts into South Asia.

Threat posed by the locust attacks

• Crop damage: One square km swarm can eat as much food as 35000 people in a day. The recent desert locust attack has wiped out crops spread over 5,00,000 hectares in Rajasthan. It poses a serious threat to India’s food security in the recent future. They also destroy forest and urban vegetation areas if they are unable to find crops to feed.
• Allergies: Locust swarms often create allergens that aggravate allergies.
• Air travel: Generally, locusts are found at lower levels and therefore pose a threat to aircrafts especially in the critical landing and take-off phase of the flight.
• Pollution and Human Health: Use of pesticides such as Malathion 96 and Chlorpyrifos to thwart the probem of locust contributes to soil and water pollution.

Both are extremely toxic and a high level of exposure to the pesticides may cause nausea, dizziness and even death. In India, Locust Warning Organisation (LWO), under Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, is responsible for monitoring, survey and control of Desert Locust in Scheduled Desert Areas mainly in the States of Rajasthan and Gujarat. The steps taken by India to tackle the threat of locust attack include:

• Several Locust Circle Offices and temporary camps have been established to control and monitor the attack in coordination with District Administration and agriculture field machinery of affected states.
• Drones are used to spray pesticides on tall trees and inaccessible places for effective control of locusts.
• The Centre has compensated some of the farmers who suffered losses from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) Fund.
• Hindustan Insecticides Limited is now in the process of production and supply of 25MT Malathion for supply to locust control programme to Iran under Government to Government arrangement.

As the recent locust attack has shown that India’s food security remains vulnerable to such events, India needs to deeply engage with other regional countries like Pakistan and Iran to effectively tackle such future locust attacks by taking mitigating steps in the breeding grounds of these locusts itself.