The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns that an infestation of desert locusts in Sudan and Eritrea is rapidly spreading along both sides of the Red Sea towards Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Even with all the gruesome weaponry that fallen man has created over the years, few things are creepier or more disturbing than when the insect world comes swarming. When God wanted to get Pharoah's attention in the Old Testament, He sent plagues of disgusting insects and reptilian creatures. Right now, billions of locusts are descending on Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Kinda funny, though, how these swarms almost always skip right over Israel, isn't it?
"And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power." Revelation 9:3 (KJV)
But in the near future, in the days after the
Pretribulation Rapture of the Church, there will be a swarm of locusts in Israel that will come up from the bottomless pit. The Bible says about that time
"And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them." That will happen during the
time of Jacob's trouble. In the meantime, enjoy this Tribulation preview of locusts in the Middle East.
SPEAK OF THE BIBLE: LOCUST SWARMS IMMINENT IN EGYPT, SAUDI ARABIA
FROM THE JERUSALEM POST: According to an agency press release, heavy rains triggered two generations of breeding since October, leading to
a substantial increase in the locust population.
“The next three months will be critical in bringing the locust situation under control before the summer breeding starts,” FAO’s Senior Locust Forecasting Officer Keith Cressman said.
Earlier this year, the insects evoked biblical times when they showed up at holy sites in Mecca, covering some areas in darkness and sparking a thunderstorm of hail and fire on social media.
“These locusts are normally present in low numbers in the desert and don’t cause a big problem. But following a large rainfall they can quickly multiply, eventually forming hopper bands or swarms of adults, composed of billions of individual locusts,” Cressman told The Media Line.
According to the FAO, locust swarms can extend outwards several hundred square miles, containing roughly 40-80 million adult locusts in each square mile.
What makes these insects so dangerous is their threat to food security, says Cressman.
“A desert locust adult can consume its own weight (roughly 2 grams) in food in a day. The added difficulty is they’re normally in the desert, so they’re eating the vegetation there.
“Once they get into rainfed crops on the edge of the desert, grown by poor farmers, they’re eating an entire livelihood, and then they move into the country and affect national food supplies,” he emphasized.
Therefore, a swarm of about 40 million locusts eats the same amount of food in one day as about 35,000 average people. A swarm reaching the size of Paris would eat the same quantity of food in 24 hours as half the population of France, according to the FAO.
“When a locust swarm lands, it can cause crop losses of 80-100 percent,” Dr. Arianna Cease, Director of the Global Locust Initiative at Arizona State University, told The Media Line. “This is particularly devastating for subsistence farmers who depend on their crops to feed their families.”
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