Man Aggravates a Natural Disaster
Tragedy is striking Niger, the former French colony in west Africa, where an estimated 3,5-million people are starving and thousands are expected to die daily. Drought and poverty are the main causes of the lack of food, but over the past year west Africa has been ravaged by a plague of locusts.
Niger has one of the least free economies in Africa and, according to Transparency International, it is also one of the most corrupt. If its citizens were living in a country that protected their property better, encouraged free enterprise and trade, and was less corrupt, it is less likely that as many would be starving now. But looking at the domestic institutional failures that may have led to this famine does not seem to have much traction in the world’s media.
Commentators are beginning to blame western policies for contributing to Niger’s famine. David Loyn of the BBC is even citing man-made climate change as a contributor: “Climate change has made Niger a more precarious place to live”. Loyn says it is curious that not since the great famine of 1973 has there been a cycle of three bad years in a row.
He says there was a drought last year, followed by locusts that ravaged the region. This year the rain has been patchy, so people talk of a second year of drought. This is the only evidence he presents that the drought is caused by climate change. He fails to note that the famine of 1973 came at a time when global temperatures were at their lowest for most of the past century. Popular opinion notwithstanding, the link between man-made emissions and drought in Niger is tenuous.
But western policies that perpetuate aid rather than trade do cause direct harm, however worthy the intention, and this is also true of the environmental policy that banned the only viable form of protection against the locusts that have caused such devastation. The desert locust can devour its own weight in food in 24 hours. A ton of locusts, which is a tiny part of the average swarm, eats the same amount of food in a single day as 10 elephants, 25 camels or 2500 people.
Locusts first moved south last year from their breeding grounds in north Africa towards west Africa, causing widespread problems last September. But now a new wave is hatching and, as vegetation disappears in the semidesert of the Sahel (Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger and Chad) at the end of the rainy season, the locusts are heading back north. After years of drought, this year’s heavy rains (in parts of the Sahel) have provided perfect breeding conditions.
Before they mature and can fly, locusts proceed through various stages and can be attacked most easily when they are “hoppers”–the stage before flight. Once locusts mature and can swarm, only crop-duster-style spraying of massive amounts of insecticide can stop them, which is expensive.
Chad and Algeria have been hit by swarms and all that their domestic politicians could fund, with the help of the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization, was occasional aerial spraying. Cape Verde, Senegal, Mauritania, Libya and Niger have all had massive hopper presence and could have reduced the future swarms, but they could not afford to do much.
That is because they could not use dieldrin, an insecticide banned by the UN Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. Dieldrin used to be sprayed across the path of approaching hoppers and its persistence meant that a single spray of a thin barrier strip was enough to wipe out vast swathes of hoppers for weeks. There are alternatives, but none as cost-effective, and for debt-laden, cash-strapped countries of the Sahel, the lack of dieldrin meant not stopping the hoppers.
Dieldrin’s high persistence means it should not be used for anything else but stopping locusts, but because the countries that are now sending aid, and which designed the Stockholm treaty, do not have locust infestations, they forgot to exempt it for such use. Oh dear.
It is possible that the green alarmists maybe be correct that this recent drought and famine are made worse by man’s emissions of greenhouse gases. But what is certain is that these same alarmists promoted a treaty that is causing death.
Roger Bate is a resident fellow at AEI.
