Abstract
THE Fifth International Locust Conference held at Brussels at the end of August was attended by delegates from more than twenty countries. The great economic importance of the problem was emphasized by the results of a statistical inquiry organized by the International Centre for Anti-Locust Research in London. The information collected from the majority of the countries suffering from locusts and grasshoppers showed that the average cost of these pests to the World amounts to not less than 15 million pounds per annum. Discussions at the Conference were centred mainly round the necessity of establishing permanent organizations for the supervision of the original centres of locust outbreaks, with a view to the prevention of such outbreaks in future. An agreement was reached by the various delegations that such organizations should be established without delay and financed on an international basis. This decision was made possible by the extensive investigations carried out during recent years by an international team of entomologists surveying some of the most inaccessible parts of Africa and Arabia. There is every hope that the recommendations made by the Conference will be adopted and acted upon by the Governments concerned, and that the control of locusts by the prevention of the swarm formation will become an accomplished fact.
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International War on Locusts. Nature 142, 565 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/142565b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/142565b0