Winged Invasion

Locusts came from the west, from the wild Chaco region of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay. They swarmed into southern Brazil on a 60-mile front, blotting out the sun as they flew, making more noise than a squadron of diving planes. It took them four hours (at 9 m.p.h.) to fly over one village in Paranaa state. They blocked roads, stalled trains, invaded houses. They devastated eight towns, ate up an estimated 60,000 tons of wheat --more than half of Brazil's small but vital wheat crop.

And still they came, the red-legged Schistocerca paranensis, in fresh waves from Argentina. Farmers tried to scare them off by waving bamboo sticks, beating drums, blowing sirens, sending out little dogs with bells around their necks.* Others tried shoveling up all young locusts still unable to fly, piling them in fenced-off areas and burying or burning them.

The hum of the invaders stirred Rio to action. With the flying hordes momentarily stalled by rain and cool weather about 90 miles south of Sao Paulo's great coffee plantations, the first act of Brazil's new Chamber of Deputies was to vote an emergency $97,380 for grasshopper defense. Last week a Brazilian military plane headed south from the U.S. with a two-ton load of flamethrowers provided in a hurry by the U.S. Gammexane, modern man's best bet in such warfare, was unobtainable, and the Biological Institute of Sao Paulo had to concoct its own insecticide right behind the lines. Experts agreed that only a miracle could save the farmers of southern Brazil. But cariocas were confident that the locusts would not come to Rio, because there (said they) everybody has to stand in line to get anything to eat.

* But apparently not by sending out turkeys to eat them. When North Dakota farmers tried this a few years ago, local rumor had it that the turkeys eturned picked clean of feathers.

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