Horizon - Man and Science Today

When this programme was first screened in January, The Times reviewed it as a 'fascinating nightmare of the locusts... women rushing into their fields, flapping pieces of cloth, made a macabre but marvellous ballet.'
A plague of locusts: few natural disasters provoke more distaste, more horror, more fear, than this great biblical threat. But now, once again, locusts are on the move. From India to West Africa and from the Mediterranean to Tanzania there is a real threat of plague.
The desert locust has been in recession for several years, but for some two years now it has been breeding quietly, unseen, in the vastness of the Empty Quarter in Southern Arabia, in the southern Sahara, and along the shores of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Huge swarms appeared last spring and summer and by the autumn the experts were prophesying the worst plague for many years-a plague that could threaten one-fifth of the land surface of the world and threaten the food supplies of millions of people.
A Horizon unit spent several weeks filming at the 'storm-centre' of the plague in Ethiopia.
(Colour)