Marcus Prior, a WFP public information officer based in Senegal, sent this e-card describing how the worst locust invasion in 15 years has devastated the harvest in Mauritania, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in urgent need of food aid.

Nouakchott, February - His face beaten into corrugated submission by the Sahelian sun, Naji Ould Mohammed goes to open the door to his grain store. After a brief battle with his arthritic fingers to release the hinges, the sun pours in and drops a shaft of daylight on an all but empty room. Over in a shadowy corner lies one last bundle of sorghum.

“Normally I would have food piled up to here,” Naji tells us, pointing to the bleached sheaves of corn which protect the roof. “This year…” his voice trails away into the dust, his hands held in helpless surrender.

UNFORGIVING LAND

Naji works some of the most unforgiving land in the world around the village of Bouchamo, just a few kilometres from Mauritania’s southern border with Senegal.

At first sight, Mauritania’s Sahel belt looks all but uninhabitable. But hundreds of thousands of agro-pastoralists do eke out a living from its sparse, thin soils, dependent on the rain to fall or a river to rise for the success of their annual crops.

Until last year, three years of drought had rendered the land more marginal then ever. In 2004, however, came the bitterest irony; a season of good rains and the prospect of a decent harvest, only for the rain to bring another curse: locusts.

WORST INVASION FOR 15 YEARS

In the Sahel region’s worst invasion in 15 years, locusts infested every corner of Mauritania’s agricultural zone, munching their way through the cereal and other crops that are the lifeblood of the rural poor.

“Fighting them is like fighting a war,” says Sid’ahmed ould Mohamed, an entomologist at Mauritania’s Locust Control Centre.

“They can eat their own body-weight in food every day and travel over 100 kilometres in any direction. They’re incredibly difficult to defeat.”

DEVASTATING DAMAGE

The damage wreaked by the locusts has been devastating; studies by WFP show that six out of 10 families in the agro-pastoral zone will not have enough to eat in 2005.

The hungry season when food stocks begin to run short would normally begin in late April, but like Naji, many people are already staring disaster in the face.

Treasured cattle and other livestock are being sold, as are prized personal possessions; with virtually no other means to generate cash, desperate times call for desperate measures.

LOSS OF ENTIRE HARVESTS

“Entire harvests have gone from under the noses of the very people who invested so much time and energy planting them,” says Sory Ouane, WFP’s country director in Mauritania.

“The international community must respond quickly if we are not to face a humanitarian crisis here over the next few months.”

At Maghta Lahjar, some 360 kilometres southeast of the capital Nouakchott, mothers and their children converge on a WFP feeding centre. The children do not yet look malnourished, but this is a fight that has started early: prevention, rather than cure.

Nevertheless, the scarcity of food in the area is already beginning to bite.

MORE AND BETTER FOOD

“All the children here need more food and better food,” says Kadijatou mint Billale, cradling 14-month-old Achitou mint Haboude.

“Without the food organised here we would not have enough to keep our children healthy. My own child has been ill several times because we have not been able to find enough food for her.

“Before the locust invasion we always had enough to eat. But this year the locusts ate everything and we don’t have the food we need.

"We are very worried about the future but we are doing whatever we can to get through this difficult time. Inshallah, if rain comes this year we will have a better time of things.”

NO GUARANTEE

Worryingly, Sid’ahmed ould Mohammed from the Locust Control Centre says there is no guarantee the locusts will not return again in 2005.

What really angers him, however, is that an earlier and more generous response from donors could have gone a long way to ensuring the damage caused by the locusts was kept to a minimum.

“It makes me very angry because I know that we could have prevented all of this if we’d got aid earlier,” he says. “There is a big lesson for all of us from what has happened here.

“We can’t be 100 percent sure but it’s quite possible that the locusts could return again this year. It depends on the climatic conditions but if we have more rain there is no doubt that we will have more locusts.

“That would be a disaster for Mauritania.”