Insect Front

In London last week United Nations brass hats plotted the tactics and logistics of a great offensive against insects. In Egypt and Ethiopia, India and Iran, Arabia and, Rhodesia, scouts had been sent to feel out the enemy's positions.

The enemy: locusts--who would like nothing better than to eat the extensive crops planted throughout the Middle East and Africa to feed Allied troops.

With a bow to the book of Exodus,* the British Colonial Office said: "While the attention of the whole world has been focused on the alliance of all free peoples for the elimination of the pests of Naziism ... an alliance has been formed for a world war against a pest which in Biblical times paralyzed ancient Egypt."

The British know well the famines that follow in South and East Africa, Egypt and Palestine when the long-winged, omnivorous grasshoppers regularly descend on the lands. One locust invasion of Kenya did -L-300,000 worth of crop damage. They know that the creeping locust hordes have actually slushed trucks and even trains to a stop with the muck of their billion-bodied mass. One mass of locusts crossing the Red Sea covered an area of 2,000 sq. mi. Said Britain's Russian-born entomologist, Boris Petrovich Uvarov, locust-control authority and a chief organizer of the new campaign: "The world suffers 15,000,000 Ib. worth of crop losses yearly through locusts--in other words, man yearly grows 15,000,000 Ib. of crops to feed locusts. . . . Since they know no boundaries and require no passports, their control is possible only by international arrangement. . . ."

Locust females of the three varieties found in Middle Afro-Asia lay several hundred eggs each (by backing into the ground) which grow in a few weeks to winged adults from inch-long size to finger-length miniature bombers, can cross oceans. Experience has shown locusts had best be destroyed in their youth before they gang up and get off the ground. So observers watch their breeding spots. Since last February R.A.F. pilots patrolling the Red Sea have watched for locust swarms as well as enemy aircraft. First step is to destroy the egg emplacements, then spread poison weak enough to leave cattle unharmed, but strong enough to stop the thunderous gnashing of the feeding insects.

* And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt. . . . They covered the face of the whole earth so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees . . . and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field through all the land of Egypt.--Exodus, 10:14, 15

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.