Resort cities in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula are being overrun by swarms of locusts. Efforts to stem the invasion have been hampered due to a crippling shortage of diesel fuel, one of many commodities which have been impacted by Egypt’s spiraling economic decline. Crisis managers need the diesel fuel to power their fleets of insecticide-spraying vehicles.

In the meantime, the locusts are attacking motorists on highways:

General Adel Kassab, head of the South Sinai Security Directorate’s operations and crisis management centre, was quoted as saying that that swarms of locusts were attacking cars on the highway as a result of the shortage of diesel fuel… On Tuesday, locust swarms spread to the South Sinai cities of Abu Zeneima, Abu Erdees, Ras Sedr and Taba, despite the security directorate’s efforts to combat them.

Meanwhile a new report has linked widespread child malnutrition to Egypt’s financial crisis. A World Food Programme (WFP) survey found that food shortages and increased poverty rates left more than half of Egyptian children under age five who were surveyed anemic. Nationwide about 31 percent of children under five experienced stunted growth in 2011

The WFP’s Egypt director traced the origins of the country’s nutrition crisis back almost a decade, and noted that food insecurity has spiked in the last three years. Egypt’s incumbent president Mohamed Morsi ran partly on a platform of economic stabilization and reform, but once elected the Muslim Brotherhood-linked president spent political capital on promoting Islamist policies rather than on reforming Egypt’s heavily subsided economy.

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