Shortly after Natalina Atim started farming in South Sudan’s Eastern Equatoria state, she lost a third of her harvest from the one-hectare maize field she had planted. The field was in flowering stage when her farm was invaded by desert locusts in 2021, the year South Sudan experienced its most severe plague of locusts in modern history.
The swarming of locusts, with their legendary effects on crops, resulted in the widespread ruin of farms belonging to local communities such as Atim’s in Magwi County. The destruction of food crops and grazing land throughout the country greatly affected the livelihoods and food security status of many hundreds of vulnerable people, the majority of whom were women.
Despite the devastation she had witnessed, Atim, 48, a single mother and a grandmother, did not give up subsistence farming as she struggled to feed her family of nine. “When the locusts invaded our farm, we lost almost everything as we had not yet harvested, along with [losing] those crops we had just planted and were beginning to sprout, including maize and sorghum,” she recounted.
“This hit us so hard because we had just returned from the refugee camp in Uganda a few months before and were barely getting by as we tried to resettle.”
Since then, Atim and her Lacas Pelony farming group have received training in pest surveillance and good agronomy practices. They have also received seeds for maize, cassava, and cowpeas to help them embark on their journey to economic recovery. Atim put the training skills and seeds to use, cultivating six hectares on which she planted maize and cassava for three seasons. “From the three-acre section of the farm, where I planted cassava, I have harvested 7 tonnes,” she said. “And I have harvested 2.2 tonnes of maize from the other three acres.”