A locust invasion is destroying farmland in East Africa, raising fears of starvation

Countries caught unprepared to battle fast-moving swarms

Today's expression: Know-how
Explore more: Lesson #241
March 12, 2020:

A swarm of billions of locusts is chewing through East Africa’s food supply, which is putting millions of people at risk of starvation. The region is already one of the world’s most impoverished, and the UN is now warning of a potential humanitarian disaster. Plus, learn the English phrase “know-how.”

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A swarm of locusts is chewing through East Africa’s food supply, putting millions of people at risk of starvation

Hi there, welcome back to Plain English. I’m Jeff, JR is the producer, and you are listening to Episode 241, so you know what that means. The full transcript, video lesson, and all the additional resources for this episode are available at PlainEnglish.com/241.

Coming up today: A plague of desert locusts—grasshoppers—has been attacking crops in East Africa, threatening millions of people with starvation. In the second half of the episode, we’ll talk about the English word “know-how.” And in the video lesson, we talk about how to talk about quantities with “by the” plus a quantity. If you’ve ever heard of the movie, “Cheaper by the Dozen,” then you’ve heard this construction. That’s the video lesson at PlainEnglish.com/241 for Plain English Plus+ members.


Desert locust threatens East Africa’s food supply

An infestation of desert locusts is chewing through East Africa’s farmland, raising serious concerns about the food supply in several nations. About 20 million people are now facing severe food insecurity and are at risk of malnutrition or even starvation. The cause? The desert locust—a yellow-looking grasshopper.

The locusts don’t travel by the hundreds, by the thousands, or even by the millions. They travel by the billions. A swarm of approximately 192 billion locusts, covering a land area three times the size of New York City, attacked the farmland in northeast Kenya. A swarm that large can eat as much food in a day as do tens of millions of people.

East Africa cannot afford to lose that much food. The region is already one of the world’s most impoverished and it doesn’t have the money, infrastructure, or trade relationships to import the food it needs to feed its population. People in that region rely on locally-grown food to survive, and there is not a lot of food left over. What’s more, agriculture represents about a third of the economic activity in the area and supports over half the region’s employment. A large part of these economies, and the livelihoods of the region’s citizens, are in grave danger.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, has urgently requested $138 million in food aid from the rest of the world to fight the plague; it has raised less than half that amount. The FAO is now warning of a potential humanitarian disaster.

Crops are being devoured by insects at an alarming rate. The locusts are indiscriminate: a locust can eat the equivalent of its body weight each day and doesn’t much mind what it eats. It will eat almost any part of any native plant in the desert. When a swarm of locusts arrives, it is so dense that it darkens the sky, a frightful signal to farmers that their crops are doomed. The locusts quickly chew through planted crops, leaving entire farms decimated in a matter of a few days or less. A single locust can travel 95 miles in a day. These swarms move fast.

The desert locust is a very, very old species with hardened survival mechanisms. In a normal year, they coexist peacefully with farmers in the region—like any other insect. But sometimes, a combination of factors causes them to multiply rapidly and form large swarms. It is a rare type of species that can be both solitary and gregarious. When solitary, individual locusts don’t move together and they don’t tend to travel very far. Locusts are in this phase in most years. However, when breeding conditions are such that the population density increases—when there are many locusts in the same area—they switch to their gregarious phase. When there are many locusts packed tightly, their legs touch each other and that triggers a metabolic response with several effects. One is that they start to act as a pack; another effect is that they give off hormones that cause them to multiply even faster. The cascade effect creates huge swarms of billions of locusts, all moving together, all voraciously competing for food.

Locust swarms are an age-old phenomenon; they are described in the Bible and the Koran. The right combination of rain and humidity can trigger the formation of a locust plague—and a plague can last several years. This one started two years ago when cyclones dumped rain on the deserts of Oman, Yemen, and Somalia.

Modern technology can help contain the locusts, primarily through aerial spraying. The knowledge to contain a locust swarm exists, but that’s only half the battle. Putting that knowledge into practice is another story entirely.

The main challenge is that the governments in this area are both poor and unstable. Authorities in Somalia cannot spray the whole country out of fear that insurgents will shoot down the planes. Countries in the region formed an organization in 1962 to prepare for and fight locust plagues. But many of the countries haven’t paid dues into the organization, which now finds itself unprepared to deal with the crisis. Kenya, with one of Africa’s largest populations, has only deployed eight aircraft. Uganda is seriously lacking in the planes, organization, and know-how required to spray effectively.


This must be a record—the last three episodes have all been science-related. Four if you count the coronavirus one. That is really out of my comfort zone! And I’ve got another biology-related one in the back of my mind. I might have to postpone that one a bit just for variety’s sake.

If you’re a science geek, though, and you want to know when the science episodes are available, the best way to do that is to be on our e-mail list so you get an announcement every time we post a new episode. JR includes a helpful summary of each episode in his emails out every Monday and Thursday. To get those, just go to PlainEnglish.com/mail.

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Expression: Know-how