Locust Invasion

Ominous pink clouds, as deadly as contaminated air, drifted out of war-torn Algeria into peaceful Tunisia last week. They were locusts, countless millions of them, spawned in areas of Algeria where the civil war had slackened normal spray control. They descended on scores of tiny oases in Tunisia's date-and-olive country. With horrified fascination Tunisians watched them swarm over the ground, in a matter of hours eat every green thing in sight, and then disappear into the hearts of the date palms, thereby dooming the trees. .

Tunisia's supplies of anti-locust insecticide exhausted,-Premier Habib Bourguiba called on the U.S. for help. Next day the first of twelve U.S. Globemasters and Flying Boxcars from France flew in with chemicals and spraying equipment picked up in Morocco. As the pungent odor of Hexachlorocyclohexane spread across the land, the invasion was brought partially under control, but an estimated 70% of Tunisia's $8,500,000 date crop had disappeared. For the Tunisians, the locust scourge was one more portent that nothing will be right in North Africa until the Algerian war is over.

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