Large swarm of Locusts have infested on pasture land in the north and east regions of Somaliland, authorities and residents reported on Thursday. The Locust plague began in the pastureland of coastal village of Bulahar and spread across Sayla, Lughaya to Elgal, said Roble Aden, a livestock herd who travelled across the most-affected villages.
“Locusts have infested across nearly 300 kilometres of pastureland in Salal, Awdal and Sahil regions on the north and east Somaliland,” he added.
The Locusts are ravenously eating the pasture land and the crops in these regions where most of the residents are pastoralist community.
“There is nothing else other than the locusts. It is everywhere you could turn around, eating the pasture and destroying the environment. The livestock were terrorised by the locusts and they could get no pasture on the land,” Aden told Radio Ergo’s local reporter on the phone.
The governor of Sayla district Hussein Idle Barkhadle said the locusts are even invading residential estates in his district. “It is huge problem and the locusts are even in the town. I don’t think that anything other than airplanes spraying from the sky will stop them,” he said.
However, the director of The Desert Locust Control Organization for Eastern Africa (DLCO-EA) office in Somaliland Abdirahman Hussein Ismail said the impact of the locust is not as huge as people said, according to an assessment they carried out three weeks ago.
“We are planning to conduct a new assessment in the newly infested areas, and then we will come with ways to handle it,” Ismail told Radio Ergo in Hargeisa, Somaliland’s capital. He linked the locust plague in Somaliland to the recent tropical cyclone that hit in the neighbouring region of Puntland.
Nimco/MR
