The UN said that "unusual climate conditions" have enabled the locusts to reproduce more rapidly, infesting 21 counties by the end of February and reaching Kenya's borders with Uganda and Tanzania, and the arrival of the rainy season will likely make matters worse. Now, NASA is partnering with the UN to stop these locust swarms by better understanding the insects' relationship with Earth's climate. Traveling locust swarms are common in Africa, but the insect population started getting out of hand in December 2019 when hundreds of millions of the voracious bugs invaded, and they decimated about 173,000 acres of crop land. These insects are quickly rampaging across all of Africa at an alarming rate, leaving many of the citizens that live there starving and without any food to eat.
What is the situation in each of the countries in Africa?
By the summer of 2019, swarms of these insects had spread over the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden into Ethiopia and Somalia, where they continued breeding and started causing concerns. This might have been as far as the locusts got were it not for the fact that during October 2018, East Africa experienced unusually widespread and intense autumn rains, which were capped in December by a rare late season cyclone, Pawan, that made landfall in Somalia. These events triggered yet another spurt of reproductive activity.
On December 28th, 2019, several large, immature swarms were first reported to have crossed into Kenya from Somalia, entering through the towns of Mandera and El Wak. By then, the plague was Kenya's worst locust outbreak in over seventy years, affecting 172,973 acres of land and leading the country's agriculture minister to state that the authorities were unprepared for an infestation of such scale. Over the next three months, particularly favorable rains caused locust swarms to migrate to the north-western counties of Kenya, and by mid-May, cumulative crop and pasture losses were estimated to be between 5-15 percent in northern Kenya and 1-5 percent in south-eastern Kenya.