The way the government has been dealing with the locust invasion has left the public angry and confused, reports Mustafa El-Menshawy Fear and panic struck Cairo last week, when clouds swarming with millions of red locusts, each up to seven centimetres long, filled the capital's skies for a couple of hours. They smacked into office windows, landed on cars and hopped around on rooftops. Their sudden arrival was also extremely embarrassing for Agriculture Minister Ahmed El- Leithi, who was holding a press conference -- ostensibly to explain how the government was dealing with the situation -- just as the ravenous insects flew over his ministry's headquarters. That, and the fact that locusts were reported in over 13 governorates, has raised many question marks regarding the government's efforts to exterminate billions of the flying pests over the past two weeks. Experts had been warning that the unwelcome invaders could, if not dealt with properly, eat away all of the country's agricultural production in a matter of days. As the problem seemed to escalate, the ministry continued to release statements indicating that, "everything was under control", and that all the locusts had been exterminated. On Monday, however, El-Leithi admitted that a new 70 kilometre-long swarm had crossed into southwestern Egypt; just two days earlier, he had indicated that another 60-kilometre-long swarm of 400 million locusts had arrived. Locust infestations have now been reported in Sinai, the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea, all locations where the insects might find adequate breeding grounds to lay eggs and hatch. If that occurs, additional control operations would become necessary to combat even more significant numbers of fresh locusts -- which live from three to six months. Infestations were also reported in a number of Upper Egyptian governorates, although Agriculture Ministry officials said those were remnants of swarms that were partially killed by pesticides. No additional reports emerged from the Delta or the Cairo-Alexandria desert highway, both of which were plagued by high rates of infestations last week. Opposition newspapers have been urging El- Leithi to resign immediately. His ministry's handling of the situation was being called a "large- scale national scandal". Some 40 interpellations (questions that had to be answered by officials) have already been submitted to parliament on the matter. Although the file was referred to the assembly's agricultural committee for further discussions and investigations, the minister and his anti-locust units, which are in charge of early detection and control operations, have been heavily bruised by the public scrutiny. "Why does the minister keep trotting out his upbeat statements, while we can see with our naked eyes millions of locusts flying overhead in Cairo?" asked accountant Khaled Bahaa. "We can't believe him anymore," a furious Bahaa said. In Ismailia, more than 200 farmers gathered outside the governorate's headquarters to protest the delay in control operations and the damage that had occurred on their farms as a result. They were carrying plastic bags full of dead locusts that they said they had killed using their own pesticides. Ismailia is home to half a million feddans of agricultural land. Mohamed El-Shahat, the governor of Mersa Matrouh -- a town on Egypt's western border with Libya where the locusts first invaded in late October -- also complained about the anti-locust units deployed on the borders for early detection. "We notified the agriculture ministry that locusts had crossed the borders into Mersa Matrouh on 28 October. No one was at the anti-locust unit office [even though they had been put on high alert]. The anti-locust squads only began to move to treat infestations in mid-November," Shahat told weekly newsmagazine Rose El-Youssef. Experts said that delay opened a Pandora's box, since the locusts thus had the chance to move into the Delta, which features the country's largest amounts of fertile lands. El-Leithi was quick to offer convenient justifications for not taking immediate action. "We had expected the locusts to come from the southern borders with Sudan, rather than from the western borders with Libya," the minister told parliament on Saturday. A UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warning issued earlier in October -- more than 20 days before the locust crisis broke -- proves the exact opposite. On 6 October, FAO official Keith Cressman warned that Libya had been invaded by several swarms of immature locusts, and that the arrival of the unwelcome insects in Libya was a warning to the rest of the region to be ready for a "shift in population". FAO official Christian Pantenius told Al-Ahram Weekly that the body's Egypt office "alerted the Egyptian government more than a year ago to be ready for the invasion". Informed sources told the Weekly that the government's locust control operations are under-qualified as a result of a lack of properly implemented surveys providing information on the location, behaviour and life cycle of locusts. "Many of the ministry's anti-locust unit staffers have never seen locusts before," said a former member of the unit, who insisted on anonymity, "which means they would probably not be able to combat the insects properly." The ministry also ignored FAO's advice to use aerial spraying as an effective way of killing the locusts. Officials in western Egypt's Al-Wadi Al-Gadid region complained that locusts swarmed large areas even after they were sprayed with pesticides, "because the flat land there necessarily requires the use of aerial spraying". There were reports that up to 435 feddans were destroyed by the invaders, with local residents fearful that the situation could worsen amid the absence of effective control operations. The government has also come under fire for not initiating adequate public awareness campaigns the minute it received alerts of the locust invasion. When the sky was blanketed with red locusts, panic spread in places like schools, where students, for instance, mistakenly believed the insects could harm humans. Others feared that the situation was an echo of biblical plagues. In the Old Testament, locusts were the eighth of 10 plagues that God brought onto the Egyptians before the Pharaoh released the enslaved Israelites. "Farmers were not even alerted by the government about the potential invasion, or guided on what to do when the crisis broke out," said Hossam El-Kholi, the liberal Wafd Party's agriculture committee chairman. El-Kholi told the Weekly that the committee would send a letter to the ministry about how it should deal with such a crisis more properly. He said farmers' reactions to the invaders were counter-productive, if not "ridiculous". Farmers who did not have pesticides set fires and made loud noises with steel objects in a desperate attempt to keep the locusts away from their fields. Only later did the ministry complain that these actions had actually hampered their efforts to locate and control the locusts. The Agriculture Ministry refused to disclose either the extent of the damage that had been done, or the cost of combating the pests. Experts said millions must have been spent. "Every five-kilometre long swarm requires LE10 million worth of pesticides , " Egyptian entomology professor Mohamed Mustafa told Al-Jazeera. According to the FAO's Pantenius, Egypt was invaded by more than 15 swarms of locusts, which would put the overall costs of the spraying operations at LE150 million. With infestations reported in 15 governorates, the Land Centre for Human Rights claimed that 38 per cent of the nation's crops had been damaged. The ministry declined to provide any figures. Although some locusts can eat one to two times their body weight per day, FAO said on 19 November that some of the immature desert locusts that had arrived in Egypt were highly mobile, thus limiting potential crop damage. In any case, the agriculture ministry's handling of the invasion only exacerbated an already frayed situation resulting from highly publicised charges filed against senior ministry officials last year for allegedly using cancer-causing pesticides. Concerns have also been raised about the situation repeating itself in the coming years, as Egypt seemed to be transforming from a mere transit region for locusts into one of their breeding grounds. Ministry officials, however, have said that the locusts were sexually immature, which means they could not lay eggs in Egypt. Mohamed Salem, the head of Cairo University's Faculty of Agriculture insects department, however, refuted that claim. "At least 10 per cent of the locusts that flew over Cairo were mature, which holds out the possibility they would lay eggs and hatch within two weeks' time," he said. Although ministry officials and experts at the Cairo FAO office alike refuted Salem's claims, he insisted that he was right. "My evidence is clear cut; the locusts that moved from northern Egypt into southern Israel were yellowish in colour, which is a characteristic of mature locusts." News agency photos of the locusts that arrived in Israel this week did indeed indicate that the flying insects were yellow. Another concern is that, after three weeks on high alert, the anti-locust units have run out of steam. One 42-year-old unit member who joined the control operations "died because he was deeply exhausted by the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week locust control campaign", Leithi told parliament, apparently attempting to draw sympathy from angry parliamentarians. Visibly exhausted, Mohamed Abdel-Rahman, the head of the anti-locust operation, told the Weekly that his 1,300-strong team would remain on alert "on a permanent basis". Asked how they would do so without having had enough sleep for over 20 days, Abdel-Rahman's answer was brief: "We can cope." Locusts last invaded Egypt some 18 years ago, in 1986 -- when 20 swarms covering 200 kilometres reached the southern part of the country. While experts insist that the problem would be here for years to come, the Agriculture Ministry continued to say that the invading locusts would be crossing the Red Sea away from Egypt within the next few days. It's not hard to guess who people will believe this time.
