Abstract: FAO is supporting local governments facing Desert Locust (DL) invasions. Authorities responsible to respond to similar crisis may count on FAO’s holistic, well-developed approach that grants quick access to, among others:

Ÿ Essential, good-quality, technical inputs and services for DL survey and control emergency operations, including dangerous goods (such as chemical pesticides) and equipment for the related safe waste-disposal.

Ÿ SOPs for survey and control operations start-up and implementation as well as safe warehousing, management & monitoring of dangerous goods along their entire life cycle;

Ÿ Inter-state bilateral cooperation opportunities under FAO’s patronage (so called “triangulations”).

The past crises showed how important is the regular survey & control of critical geographical areas, prone to swarms growth, for prevention of new outbreaks. The latest crisis clearly show, however, that no matter how good a single local government is in introducing effective preventive measures, a new crisis could always hit its territory, due to the unpredictable and international nature of DL-crises. If this happens, when facing also a worldwide pandemic, lack of risk management, resilience, and agility in supply-chain may nullify all previous efforts. 

This paper will analyse first the DL-crises recurring supply-chain challenges and will present the specific context of the latest, still ongoing, crisis to show how the Covid-19 Word-wide Pandemic affected the supply chain of the key technical inputs forcing FAO to adjust its initial sourcing and supply-chain strategy.

The conclusions of this analysis are three concrete proposals for possible reinforcement of DL emergency supply-chain setup and, ultimately, FAO’s capacity to manage these crises offering improved support to governments’ response plans, i.e.: 

1) A new funding model enhancing new solutions for DL emergency supply chain and a new approach to crises management that build-in the overall resilience of supply networks;

2) Strengthen FAO’s emergency coordination role to introduce smart supply chain technological innovation;

3) Explore further new Private-Public-Partnership (PPP) opportunities to go beyond traditional sourcing.

    These proposals acknowledge the strategic role of the Procurement and Supply Chain Function for future successful response

    to complex DL crises  considering the limits of the traditional crisis’ preventive measures, which clearly emerged during the

    Covid-19 Pandemic that represented an exceptional stress test to measure their efficacy.

Key words: emergency supply-chain innovation, resilience for business continuity, desert-locust crisis, Covid-19, private-public partnership

JEL codes: O, O3, Q, Q1, Q110, Q160, Y, Y2