After Janaweed, locusts descend on Sudan: UN

NEW YORK, Aug 11 (AFP) — One million people are displaced in Darfur, 50,000 are dead and the United Nations said that locusts have invaded Sudan.

“The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says the locusts have entered Chad because of winds and aid workers are concerned that these winds will eventually take them on into Darfur, Sudan,” Secretary General Kofi Annan’s spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

Locusts that inflicted serious crop damage in Mauritania, Mali and Niger have entered Chad, already afflicted by a humanitarian crisis.

The United Nations estimates that up to 50,000 people have been killed since Sudan’s army forces and the Janjaweed militias cracked down on a rebellion by minority tribes which erupted in Darfur in February 2003. The government vehemently disputes that figure.

Another 1.2 million people have fled their homes in Sudan and up to 200,000 more have been settled in makeshift camps in neighboring Chad, already hit by the locusts, the United Nations says.

An army of locusts threatens to worsen Sudan’s food supply. Gigantic swarms from North Africa have hit Mauritania the worst. Millions of the finger-length insects have deluged the desert nations at the height of their planting seasons, devouring seedlings and standing crops of millet and sorghum.

Eckhard said that according to the World Food Organization, aid promised by donor countries at a recent conference in Algiers “is starting to trickle in.”

The meeting, of representatives of several Western African countries, launched an appeal to the international community for at least 58 million dollars to set up a program to battle the locusts, Eckhard said.

Chad and Niger appealed for international aid Tuesday to battle the locusts, warning their already-compromised populations could suffer food shortages if they go unchecked.

“Chad is imploring our friends and international agencies to help us battle these ravaging beasts and dispel the threat of famine for our people,” Foreign Minister Nagoum Yamassoum told diplomats in the Chadian capital N’Djamena.

Chad’s food supplies are already exhausted owing to the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the troubled Darfur region of eastern neighbor Sudan.

Some 20,000 hectares of cropland have already been destroyed by the locusts.