Between June 2019 and February 2022, a major outbreak of desert locusts began developing, threatening food supplies in East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent.

[7] In April 2020, travel and shipping restrictions precipitated by the spread of COVID-19 began to hamper efforts to control the locusts, preventing the transport of pesticides, equipment, and personnel, and contributing to the global incidence of COVID-19 related food insecurity.

[8] Locust swarms worldwide faced a steady decline in size from May to October 2020, as countries and intergovernmental organisations instituted extensive aerial and ground pest control efforts, aided by low quantities of rainfall in several affected regions, as well as the absence of storm activity in the Indian Ocean.

By October 2020, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Yemen continued to harbour significant swarms of locusts, with the remainder situated in isolated pockets of Kenya, Sudan and Saudi Arabia.

Locust swarms continued to threaten countries around the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, as well as their immediate neighbours, until February 2022 when the surge was officially declared to be over.

The swarms proceed to feed on the newly abundant vegetation, making use of improved swarm coordination, the result of larger brain sizes, as well as increased range, the result of increased metabolic activity, larger muscles, and longer wings, to travel up to 130 km a day in search of new vegetation and moist weather, often propelling themselves by the wind.

This was exacerbated in October 2018 by Cyclone Luban, which spawned in the central Arabian Sea, moved westward, and rained out over the same region near the border of Yemen and Oman.

However, the locusts had traveled far, wiping out crops in Pakistan and damaging farms in Yemen, a fragile country already hit hard by years of conflict.

This might have been as far as the locusts got were it not for the fact that during October 2018, East Africa experienced unusually widespread and intense autumn rains, which were capped in December by a rare late season cyclone Pawan that made landfall in Somalia.

Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer with the Food and Agriculture Organization said, he thinks, "we can assume there will be more locust outbreaks and upsurges in the Horn of Africa.”[22][23] The situation was fueled by unusually heavy rains,[11] causing a big concern in the Horn of Africa, where more than 24 million people are food insecure and 12 million people are internally displaced.

[citation needed] On 28 December 2019, several large, immature swarms were first reported to have crossed into Kenya from Somalia, entering through the towns of Mandera and El Wak.

[26] By then, the plague was Kenya's worst locust outbreak in over seventy years, affecting approximately 70,000 hectares (172,973 acres) of land, and leading the country's agriculture minister to state that authorities were unprepared for an infestation of such scale.

[31][32] As of October 2020, a few small (1–10 km2) swarms, slowly maturing at the border between the north-western counties of Baringo, Laikipia, and Samburu, were the only remaining gregarious locust populations in the country.

[4] Somalia’s agriculture ministry called the outbreak a national emergency and major threat to the country’s fragile food security, saying the “uncommonly large” locust swarms are consuming huge amounts of crops.

[27] In Eritrea, big swarms of immature adults that migrated from Ethiopia, were identified and controlled around Shieb, Gahtielay, Wengebo, and Beareze of the Northern Red Sea Coast.

According to the Agriculture Ministry officials, the relatively few locusts that reached Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa were “leftovers” from the “massive invasion” in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

[27] Millions of people in this country already cope with the constant risk of drought or flooding,[35] The desert locust infestation in Ethiopia has deteriorated, despite ongoing ground and aerial control operations.

Hoppers have fledged, and an increasing number of small immature and mature swarms have continued to devour crop and pasture fields in Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and Somali regional states.

The hopper bands (young locust populations moving together) had covered nearly 430 square kilometres and had consumed about 1.3 million metric tonnes of vegetation over a two-month period.

Cyclones in May and October 2018 brought heavy rains that gave rise to favourable breeding conditions in the Empty Quarter of the southern Arabian Peninsula for at least nine months since June.

The emergency was declared in Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, Lakki Marwat, Bannu, Karak, Kohat, Hangu, North and South Waziristan districts.

A number of timely measures and a change in wind direction had prevented a spread and large-scale damage to the rapeseed and cumin seed crops, the officials said.

The districts adversely affected by the large scale coordinated attacks by locusts include Sri Ganganagar, Jaisalmer, Barmer, Bikaner, Jodhpur, Churu and Nagaur.

The World Bank estimates that in Africa alone, more than 90 million hectares of cropland and pasture are at risk and damages and losses could amount to as much as US$9 billion in coming years.

The supercomputer, funded by £35m of UK aid as part of its Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa programme, has successfully forecast the movement of locusts using data such as wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity.

The Chinese government announced in February 2020 it was sending a team of experts to neighbouring Pakistan to develop "targeted programmes" against the locusts and deploy 100,000 ducks.