Through its Assistance for Emergency Locust/ Grasshopper Abatement (AELGA) Project, USAID has been a strong ally for the past seventeen years in the West Africa region’s battle against emergency trans-boundary outbreaks of pests such as desert locusts, grasshoppers and armyworm that can threaten food security.

AELGA's major objectives are to strengthen national and regional capacities to prevent and mitigate pest outbreaks while ensuring environmental safety. It does this through:

• Training activities and programs to build African capacity to monitor, survey, rapidly report, and safely manage and control pest outbreaks using environmentally benign strategies;
  
  
• Rigorous Programmatic Environmental Assessments of emergency transboundary outbreak management and control strategies;
  
  
• Detailed, country-specific Supplemental Environmental Assessments to provide guidance on how to reduce the environmental impacts of pesticide spraying campaigns;
  
  
• Research into the use alternative control strategies such as botanicals, fungal and viral pathogens;
  
  
• Research studies to better understand the population dynamics that govern the lifecycles of desert locust to more effectively predict where outbreaks might occur;
  
  
• Collaborate in and support multi-donor activities including obsolete pesticide disposal and emergency pesticide application through the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as well as regional pest control organizations; and

Outreach activities to U.S. Embassies, USAID missions, partners and other stakeholders to help guide policy and decision-making processes.