-From afar, a swarm of locusts
appears like a smudge in the sky.
Only as it gets closer does it come into focus.
♪♪
[clapping]
The swarms are mesmerizing, and if you stand in one place,
they can take hours to pass over you.
♪♪
My name's Max Bearak,
and I'm the Nairobi bureau chief for The Washington Post.
Ethiopia is facing its worst locust outbreak in generations
after an uncommon weather pattern in the Indian Ocean
caused relentless rains across the region.
Travel to the south of the country
to a normally dry area with big valleys
where people herd cattle and goats,
riding on the wind,
locusts would descend into the valleys by the billions.
[locusts buzzing, birds chirping]
Anyone who's read the Bible
knows their potential for destruction.
At their worst,
a swarm can strip entire farms and even invade grain silos.
Locusts are essentially
a hormonally charged subspecies of grasshopper.
They undergo an almost total transformation
when there's enough moisture
in the sandy soil of their breeding grounds.
They nearly double in size, sprout wings,
and a few weeks later, they take flight in unison.
-Have you ever seen a locust invasion before?
-Yes.
-What kind of of harm did the locusts cause
that previous time?
-It caused a lot of harm.
They destroyed crops and pasture.
The number of the locusts during that time was small.
It was not as much as it is right now.
-In northern Ethiopia in 1954,
locusts devoured nearly 100% of the plant cover
and together with a drought caused a yearlong famine.
Locusts are cold-blooded
and get their energy to fly from the sun.
The first swarms traveled to eastern Africa
over the Red Sea from Yemen last June and July.
This year's crisis
is to some degree related to climate change,
which is driving this unusually rainy season in East Africa.
But to an even larger degree, the crisis is driven
by the inability of governments in Somalia and Yemen,
where the locusts breed,
which have been weakened by years of war.
So once the locusts leave those breeding grounds
and become swarms,
countries like Ethiopia and Kenya
have a much harder time killing them.
It's a serious situation
in which a humanitarian crisis is already predicted to emerge,
but experts say the only solution really
is to kill all the locusts.
And that's an inexact process
that requires a lot of things to come together at once.
♪♪
Ethiopia, for instance,
has just three operational crop-dusting planes
to spray insecticides.
The planes have to take off early in the morning,
when locusts are on the ground and immobile,
but frequent rain and fog
often prevents the planes from taking off.
By the time pilots reach the swarms,
the locusts are already in the air,
spread out over miles and miles.
♪♪
I met with two South African pilots
who've been contracted by the Ethiopian government
to run spraying flights.
Their plane usually comes back covered in locust guts,
and they have to clean out the air intake
of the collected locusts regularly.
♪♪
-We try to control these pests from the crop fields,
particularly the crop fields,
and our government also provide[s] the chemical[s],
as well as the aircrafts.
Now we have got around more than 8,000 liters
[of] chemicals from our factory.
We have one plant at Adami Tulu in central Ethiopia Rift Valley.
We've got Malathion 95 percent chemical to control these pests.
-The governments of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia,
as well as the United Nations,
have asked for tens of millions of dollars
from international donors to ramp up efforts
to eliminate the locusts.
Even with the money,
locust swarms are expected to be around
until at least June,
when the rains are predicted to end,
if not through the end of 2020.