Dakar - African states prepared for battle on Tuesday at a meeting here aiming to co-ordinate expertise and equipment ahead of an expected invasion by desert locusts threatening to rival last year's worst infestation in over a decade.
Representatives from 10 countries in western, central and northern Africa were called on to expand the arsenal of weapons to head off or destroy the ravenous swarms, which can range up to 80 million insects over a square kilometre and devour twice their weight in cropland in a day.
"One of the challenges we face is defining the size of the threat (this year) and to plan our response to it," Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade told the assembled delegates, representing Morocco, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Egypt, Gambia, Tunisia, Mali and the Central African Republic.
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"It is up to you, the experts, to develop strategies to fend off this insect with its capacity for mass destruction."
Food and Agriculture Organisation chief Jacques Diouf, attending the meeting as the co-ordinator of the United Nations agencies' response to the locust threat, stressed the importance of cooperation between countries to mount an effective prevention campaign and the development of more effective pesticides.
By the end of September last year, locusts had infested between three and four million hectares of arable land in West Africa.
Mauritania was the country the worst hit in the region, with the flying insects having eaten around 1.6 million hectares of crops there, according to the FAO.
FAO experts warned in October that north Africa faced even greater crop damage this year, with Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia likely to be hit first by the invasion of flying finger-length insects. - Sapa-AFP
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