‘MORE deadly than Covid-19” – Scottish bug-buster John Clayton is fighting the threat posed by locust swarms in East Africa.

Swarms travelling up to 100 miles every 24 hours are munching the same amount of food daily as three million people.

It’s feared that crop damage caused by the insects could trigger a famine of biblical proportions and claim more lives in countries like Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya than coronavirus.

Clayton, from Glasgow, has spent 40 years trying to control insect populations.

He said the current situation is the worst he’s ever faced. The 60-year-old said: “This is potentially even more deadly than Covid-19 for communities living in the countries affected that are seeing the worst locust swarms for over 70 years.

“A bad outbreak comes around about every 10 or 12 years, but this is easily the worst we’ve had to deal with. This is personally my fourth major locust plague.

“It’s compounded by the fact that coronavirus travel restrictions are making it a lot harder to get supplies over and conduct training. The locust plagues are a crisis within a crisis.”

The United Nations is spearheading efforts to combat the problem. The UK Government has pledged £18 million to its emergency appeal.

Clayton, nicknamed the “locust terminator”, has travelled the world with specialist firm Micron Sprayers Ltd, supplying pioneering spray technology like adapted planes, helicopters and trucks to wipe out locusts.

The firm – headquartered in Bromyard, Herefordshire – supports the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which received the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) funding.

That cash is on top of £8m previously pledged by the UK to the same appeal, supporting nations including Sudan, South Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Tanzania and Pakistan to destroy the pests. A supercomputer funded by UK aid is also helping countries in East Africa to track the insects’ movements around the continent.

Some of the swarms are bigger than Paris or New York and the largest this year in Kenya covered an astonishing 930 sq miles.

On the arrival of the beasties to fields, Clayton said: “The sky can virtually blacken and it’s an astonishing thing to see. It looks like a big dark cloud and there are billions upon billions of insects.

“Even just an average swarm can destroy a year’s supply of food for 2500 in just one day, so if you are a farmer, and they land on your crop, it spells big trouble.

“A crop a farmer has prepared manually over months of hard work to prepare a small field of maize will just be stripped bare by locusts within an hour or two.

“It’s obviously very distressing and it is a cruel twist of fate that it’s people already on the margins of malnutrition are the people most affected when these locusts come out of the desert.”

The current outbreak first emerged from the Arabian Peninsula last December, with the brutal civil war in Yemen impeding efforts to get it under control.

Clayton said: “Coronavirus has made it just the perfect storm. They are not just dealing with locusts, but coronavirus and internal security issues. It’s a triple whammy for some countries, which is threatening millions of people with hunger

and devastation.”

He went on: “People in Scotland like a good moan about midges, but these locust plagues make that pale into insignificance.

“The situation in Africa, Pakistan and India is life and death unless we stop them.”

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said: “The UK Government is proud to be supporting the efforts combating the worst locust outbreak in decades, made worse by the coronavirus pandemic.

“British expertise is playing a crucial role in protecting vulnerable communities on the brink of starvation, by helping farmers affected to wipe out these devastating swarms.

“Unless other countries also step up and act, this food security crisis will only get worse.”