“A plague amid a pandemic: East Africa and West Asia combat surging locust outbreak”
by Linda Givetash for
NBC News on June 22, 2020
Deut 28:38 “You shall bring out much seed to the field but you will gather in little, for the locust will consume it.”
Deut 28:21 “The pestilence [will] cling to you.
Rev 6:8 “Behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with . . . famine and pestilence.
Matt 9:35 “Jesus was going through all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness.”
Rev 16:2 “The first angel went and poured out the first bowl on the earth; and it became (a serious disease).”
Desert locusts have rarely reached beyond biblical proportions, but spraying over 45 billion of these insects did not stop them. The FAO (the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization) stated that a one-kilometer swarm can consume in a single day the food that 35,000 people need. Now more than 20 million people across the Horn of Africa are already suffering with insufficient food supplies. A “hunger pandemic” arising from a combination of wars to the growing locust plague could lead to as many as 300,000 deaths a day from starvation by the end of the year.
Desert locusts only live three months, but under good conditions, such as global warming, they can multiply 20 fold in one generation. Climate change exacerbated the plague with plentiful rain, including two cyclones from the Indian Ocean, that provided lush vegetation in the desert where locusts could multiply unhindered. Such an outbreak has not hit in remembered history.
The coronavirus pandemic created another barrier (besides low funds, untrained peoples, and wars) to killing off the hoards darkening the skies across countries with a blanket of devastation. Without continuous help to stop the spread, these locusts could annihilate crops leaving millions of people in at least 23 countries hungry by the end of the year.
[1] “Plague of Locusts on the Move” by CSIRO, March 7, 2020, on Wikimedia Commons; Creative Commons Attribution (CCA) 3.0 Unported license. “Egyptian Locust” by Katja Schulz, December 17, 2015, on Wikimedia Commons; CCA 2.0 Generic license. Also on Flickr. Locust feeding on leaves of Mandarin Orange.