Photograph — strangesounds.org

On Monday, the United Nation Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Ethiopian government announced that the new swarms of desert locust in East Africa could have a more devastating effect on the region bringing about high levels of food insecurity. This was discovered after a recently concluded joint assessment by FAO and the Ethiopian government.

According to FAO, over 8.5 million people in Ethiopia require emergency food aid after swarms of desert locusts damaged 200,000 hectares (half a million acres) of cropland with over 20 million people experiencing food insecurity FAO

Billions of desert locusts have already chomped their way through much of the region, including Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, Eritrea, Tanzania, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda.

Fatouma Seid, FAO Ethiopia representative, said farmers and pastoralists in the country, needed help in the form of agricultural inputs and cash transfers to get them through the emergency, which was being worsened by the coronavirus pandemic.

“It is critical to protect the livelihoods of the affected population especially now that the situation is compounded by the COVID-19 crisis,” Seid said, referring top the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

Read more on: Aljazeera

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