East Africa is bracing for a third outbreak of desert locusts, with billions of the destructive insects about to hatch and threaten food supplies in a region already reeling from damaging rains and the coronavirus pandemic.

"Tens of thousands of hectares of cropland and pasture have already been damaged across the Horn and East Africa," the International Rescue Committee said in a report this month, noting even a small swarm could devour the same amount of food in a day as approximately 35 000 people.

In Ethiopia between January and April, locusts destroyed 1.3 million hectares of grazing land and nearly 200 000 hectares of crops, resulting in the loss of 350 000 tonnes of cereals, IGAD, the East Africa regional organisation, said in a June report.

East Africa has endured a string of disasters of near-Biblical proportions in 2020: surging rain and devastating floods, locusts and then amid it all - a viral pandemic.

On 11 June, the credit rating agency Fitch Ratings noted that while coronavirus was the primary factor affecting growth "the ongoing desert locust invasion represents significant downside risk to East Africa's macroeconomic stability".