Desert Locust Resurgence in Eritrea and Djibouti

A single desert locust swarm can contain 200 million insects per square mile, travel 90 miles in a day, and eat as much food as 35,000 people by nightfall. A new generation hatches every 12 weeks. Each one is, on average, 20 times the size of the last. These are not background statistics, they are the arithmetic of famine, and in the Horn of Africa between 2019 and 2021, that arithmetic ran largely unchecked.

The coverage that emerged from the upsurge focused, understandably, on Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, large countries, large populations, existing humanitarian infrastructure to generate and transmit information. What it mostly missed were the two countries sitting at the corridor through which the crisis entered the region in the first place. Eritrea and Djibouti, ranked 178th and 175th out of 193 countries on the Human Development Index respectively, and notable, in the architecture of international response, mostly by their absence from it.

Eritrea is not a country that lacks locust activity. It hosts desert locusts every year, summer breeding in the western lowlands from July to October, winter breeding along the Red Sea coast from November through to April. It has survey teams, control teams, and a dedicated Desert Locust Information Officer who tracks the situation and files monthly reports.

In 2020, the government managed control operations across 60,300 hectares. The institutional capacity, relative to its neighbours, is real. What it lacks is connectivity, to the broader regional picture, to what is happening simultaneously across the border in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, where swarms originate before moving west.

Mr Keith Cressman, who served as The Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) Senior Desert Locust Forecasting Officer for over 35 years and personally designed the organisation's global early warning system, is direct about this limitation. Eritrea's forecast is accurate within its own borders, he says, but the country's teams have no visibility into what is building in nearby states. The swarm arrives with more notice than the data does.

Djibouti is a more acute case. Its breeding areas are small, a narrow coastal strip running East from the capital toward Somalia, active only between November and March, and even then only when conditions cooperate. The country has a handful of plant protection officers and no dedicated locust monitoring post. In practical terms this means surveys happen infrequently, and when a swarm moves, the institutional response is thin.

In June 2020, locusts crossed from Yemen over the sea into Djibouti and pushed directly into eastern Ethiopia. The corridor was used, the damage was done, and the early warning infrastructure in Djibouti was not built to catch it. By the time the 2020 upsurge reached its peak, more than 80% of the 1,700 agropastoral farms across 23 agricultural sites in Djibouti had been affected. World Bank projections put damages and losses at up to $8.5 billion for that year. The World Food Programme warned that long-term response and recovery costs could exceed $1 billion if swarm growth went uncontrolled. It largely did.

The deeper problem, which Mr Cressman has spent his career trying to address, is that desert locusts do not recognise national borders but international response systems are built as if they do. When locust populations build in one country and rainfall keeps conditions favourable, breeding can intensify within weeks and spill across multiple frontiers before any coordinated response is mobilised.

‘Every recession-area country must maintain the operational capacity to detect, monitor, and respond,’ he says. ‘If even one country lacks sufficient capacity, locusts can invade, breed, multiply, and then migrate to neighbouring regions.’ The weakest link is not a metaphor here. It is a specific geography, a coastline, a border zone, a country too poor or too isolated to staff the monitoring post that would catch the outbreak before it becomes a crisis.

The 2003 to 2005 upsurge, the previous major event before 2019, destroyed between 80 and 100% of crops in affected areas. When the 2019 cycle began, over 23 million severely food insecure people and more than 12 million forcibly displaced were already living across the Greater Horn of Africa. The swarm hit a region with almost no margin.

Control operations, when they happened, were expensive, chemical insecticides running at $10 to $30 per hectare treated, biological alternatives like Metarhizium acridum at similar cost but without the environmental damage. The shift toward biological control has been gradual, use rose from 5% of treatments in 2004 to over 30% by 2017, covering more than 100,000 hectares annually. It is progress, but it depends on the capacity being there to deploy it, and in Djibouti and Eritrea, that capacity is uneven at best.

Mr Cressman retired from FAO in 2024, and he is candid about what his departure represents. The forecasting skill that made the system work was built over decades of fieldwork, knowing the terrain, knowing the people, knowing what the data means when the models turn unreliable in extreme conditions.

‘For the new, young forecaster,’ he says, ‘it is much more difficult since they have not gone to most of these areas in the field and have no intuition.’ That intuition, applied consistently to countries the international system underweights, was the thing standing between an outbreak and a catastrophe.

Whether it can be rebuilt, in Djibouti and Eritrea and elsewhere, before the next upsurge arrives, is the question that nobody covering the last one thought to ask.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
https://www.fao.org/home/en
https://www.farmafrica.org/
https://www.worldvision.org.uk/about/blogs/east-africa-hunger-crisis/

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