DAKAR, Oct 19 (AFP) - The European Union has granted 50 million euros (63 million dollars) to five countries in Africa to fight locusts which have devastated cropland across the north and west of the continent, an EU statement said Monday.
The funds will benefit Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal and their use will be overseen by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the statement said.
Part of the funding -- around 24 million euros -- was from the ninth European development fund, while another two million euros came from an emergency fund set up by the European Commission to deal with the locust problem in Africa, and the remainder from bilateral funding agreements.
The funds promised by the EU represent around half of what the FAO has said it needs to effectively battle the locust problem in Africa.
Early this year, the FAO appealed for around 7 million euros of international aid, but only a few hundred thousand euros trickled in.
The needs have grown exponentially since then, and the FAO in September asked for 100 million euros.
By the end of last month, locusts had infested between three and four million hectares (7.4 million and 9.9 million acres) 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.
A new wave of locusts was stopped in southern Morocco at the weekend, as well as in the Algerian Sahel. The swarms, which can range up to 80 million insects over a square kilometer, were also moving along the Algerian-Moroccan border in the Tlemcen region.
UN and African experts warned at a meeting in Dakar on Monday that north Africa faces greater crop damage from swarms of locusts next year than from this year's invasion.
"From February onwards, agriculture in Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia will be at risk on a scale considerably greater than last year," Said Ghaout, director of Morocco's anti-locust center, told reporters.
The invasion of the finger-length insects, the worst in more than a decade, may have an impact on the social structures of countries too, said Ghaout, potentially sparking mass flights from rural villages to urban areas in search of employment if entire harvests are wiped out.
Such social problems, coupled with the possibility of a food crisis, could contribute to the destabilization of at-risk countries, he warned.
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Copyright (c) 2004 Agence France-Presse
Received by NewsEdge Insight: 10/19/2004 10:22:45