The World - News from March 25, 1988

A plague of locusts, with swarms as big as 150 square miles, threatens northern and western Africa, officials of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said. “We are really facing an extremely dangerous situation which may have very serious consequences for agricultural production in the years to come,” Lukas Brader, director of the FAO’s emergency locust operations center, told reporters in Rome. The locusts already have invaded southern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Brader said 7.5 million to 15 million acres are already infested by locusts and that when prevailing winds change in May and June, the pests could spread to eastern Africa.