09 August 2004	Monday	22 Jamadi-us-Saani 1425

NOUAKCHOTT, Aug 8: Nearly a million people in West Africa face famine unless they get international aid to battle swarms of locusts devouring their crops in the region's worst plague in 15 years, farmers and government experts warned.

The locusts are sweeping into crop-growing areas of the Sahel, on the Sahara's southern fringe, a region whose people are mostly subsistence farmers and whose governments lack the means to fight the infestation.

A fraction of a swarm can eat the same amount in a day as 10 elephants, 25 camels or about 2,500 people, experts say, destroying subsistence crops such as sorghum and millet as well as money earners like water melons and groundnuts.

"We have to expect a deficit in our cereal crop of around 80 per cent. What's more, 600,000-800,000 people will be affected by famine," Mohamed Lemine, an official from Mauritania's national agriculture federation, told reporters late on Saturday. -Reuters