The Deputy Director General of the Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB), Charles Bucagu on Tuesday said the country was getting ready to tackle the imminent threat of an invasion by desert locusts from Uganda, as the outbreak slowly impacts East Africa’s food insecurity.
“All stakeholders including agronomists have been trained and necessary equipment have been deployed to regions which are likely to be mostly affected,” Dr Bucagu told APA in an exclusive interview.
According to him,desert locust swarms don’t respect boundaries so it was important to start preparing to tackle them.
“We are aware that these insects have now reached neighboring Uganda but we have some chance of slowing their invasion,” the senior Rwandan official said.
In its latest warning, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Monday.urged a collective campaign to deal with the crisis, concerned over the risk that the swarms spill over into more countries in East Africa, “if efforts to deal with the voracious pest are not scaled up”.
Apart from Kenya and now Uganda, the outbreak of desert locusts, considered the most dangerous locust species, has also affected parts of Somalia and Ethiopia, the likes of which have not been seen on this scale in 25 years.
These three countries are the most affected by the latest locust invasion.
Scenes of frightened inhabitants trying to chase the insects away with sticks or frighten them by banging on metal sheets have been seen everywhere.
Swarms of potentially containing hundreds of millions of individual desert locusts can move 150 kilometres a day – devastating rural livelihoods.
According to the UN agency, “given the scale of the current swarms, aerial control is the only effective means to reduce the locust numbers”.
Egypt, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen are also seeing substantial breeding activity that could see locust bands expand into swarms in the coming months, the UN agency warned.
CU/as/APA