Mimi Alemayehou
2 Jul 2020
In the last several months, Covid-19 has taken up nearly every news headline in nearly every country in the world. The health impact, testing, confinement, and trying to curb the pandemic have rightly been at the forefront. In the developed world, conversations have been about corporate losses and the availability of unemployment benefits. But low-income countries experience a different reality: in sub-Saharan Africa, over 70% of workers are self-employed and a vast majority operate in the informal sector. Many bottom-of-the-pyramid Africans eat with the money they earn everyday. Within this context, when a second massive swarm of locusts covered the sky like a Biblical plague in East Africa in April, devouring vegetation and presenting “an extremely alarming and unprecedented threat” to food security and livelihoods, as expected, this piece of news barely made a splash.
On the African continent, where McKinsey predicts that up to 150-million jobs could be affected through losses and salary reductions, a temporary locust invasion has far-reaching consequences. The first, in January, was the worst that some countries had seen in 70 years and affected vegetation and pasture that covered more area than the entire land mass of the UK. The current invasion is estimated to be at least 20 times worse — and could become 400 times bigger by the end of June.
In my home country of Ethiopia, over significant amount of crop land and pasture land is impacted by locusts, severely disrupting food supply. Already one million people have been pushed into hunger. In a region where six out of 10 people experience moderate to severe food insecurity, the consequences are devastating.
Mimi Alemayehou is a ONE Campaign board member
Source: https://mg.co.za/