FAO Director-General QU Dongyu said today the Desert Locust upsurge in the Horn of Africa threatened to provoke a humanitarian crisis and appealed for urgent funding to tackle the outbreak in order to protect livelihoods and food security.

The United Nations’ (UN) Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) has released USD 10 million to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to support a rapid scale-up of control operations aimed at containing the spread of Desert Locust swarms in East Africa.

Desert Locust swarms in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia - already unprecedented in their size and destructive potential - could swell exponentially and spill over into more countries in East Africa if efforts to deal with the voracious pest are not massively scaled up across the region, FAO warned today.