RIYADH — The Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture has started a massive campaign to discover and eradicate swarms of locusts invading farms in the Kingdom through nine ground teams and an air team in the Riyadh region, according to a report in Makkah daily on Tuesday. Mohammed Al-Shamrani, head of the ministry's department to combat locusts, said swarms of desert locusts were detected coming from the Empty Quarter through the border triangle between the Kingdom, Yemen and Oman. He said the locusts multiplied in the area following the rains between May and October 2018, which created a suitable atmosphere for their breeding and multiplication. Shamrani said the field teams were able to fight the locusts in the Al-Aflaj and Al-Sulail regions in 980 hectares of farmland out of 1,900 hectares where the locusts were seen. He said the teams successfully wiped out red locusts from 480 hectares of a targeted area of 1,000 hectares before they started breeding. He said there were between 1,000 and 1,300 locusts per hectare. Shamrani said in the villages of Miran, Al-Qanis and Al-Ojailah in Al-Sulail region, the field teams were able to combat the locusts over an area of 500 hectares. He said 34 employees and three engineers from the ministry's branch in Riyadh were persistently spraying pesticides to prevent the locusts from multiplying. "The ministry is making preemptive moves to reduce the spread of locusts and prevent their harms on agriculture," he said. Shamrani said the locusts are being monitored in more than 1,500 locations in the Kingdom to protect neighboring countries from their invasion.
