Cost Benefit Analysis of Desert Locusts Control: A Multicountry Perspective

During the campaigns of the fifties through the nineties, spraying desert locust (DL) was considered to be the only effective instrument in the sense of reducing agricultural damage. Nevertheless, this strategy has been criticized by FAO, donors and affected countries partly because this strategy is connected with considerable resources and partly because spraying may lead to harmful effects to farmers and their environment. However, depending on the lack and scarcity of reliable data both on the effects of spraying as well as their costs and it is not easy to unambiguously change control strategy and concentrate on alternative methods to deal with DL plagues. To close this gap, the objective of this study is to shed light on this problem, to study whether the Moroccan, the Sudanese and the Eritreans agricultural sectors suffered from DL invasions of the eighties and nineties, and to compare the benefits and costs of DL control campaigns. The contingent valuation method (CVM) is used here to estimate total benefits of not using insecticides and to compensate farmers in the case of DL invasion. The results of the CVM show that instead of using insecticides farmers are willing to pay an amount per year to a fund that can compensate them for the losses caused by desert locusts.