Miles away Boer farmers heard it and trembled: a noise like a giant crumpling enormous sheets of paper. The noise came from a black cloud 500 miles wide sweeping down from West Africa last week at the rate of 100 miles per day. It was the rustling of billions upon billions of locusts' wings. Whirring swarms dropped down on fields ripe for the autumn harvest, and when they moved on there were no leaves, no grass, no growing things.
As the Bible remarks and as Shakespeare emphasized, fat locusts are good to eat,...