Abstract:
Spring 2020. While most of the world is focused on fighting the severe acute respiratory syndrome, the coronavirus disease 2019 (SARS-COVID-19), massive swarms of locusts (Locusta migratoria) are ravaging crops across South East Asia, the Middle East and Africa causing a major threat to food security and livelihoods. To face the emergency of both crises, the international community looks for the quickest fixes. For COVID-19, the World Health Organization has facilitated an ‘unprecedented program to develop a vaccine and research into potential pharmaceutical treatments’. For locust swarms, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s ‘absolute priorityis to prevent a breakdown in pesticide stocks in each country’. This search for silver bullets repeatsitself almost invariably throughout the history of humanity and every set of new problems is solved by a new set of quick fixes, which often generate new problems in a snowball effect. The cascading deleterious effects of pesticide use on the natural world and human health has sparked widespread debate within the scientific community and the broader public since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Ironically, while eating swarming locusts was a widespread practice wherever plagues occurred, it is now discouraged as chemical residues may pose a major health risk. Obviously, it is more than ever time to escape the silver bullet syndrome, to stop attacking the symptoms and start tackling the causes, and to have a broader and more integrated view of challenges faced by humanity.