Around two billion people eat insects that they catch in the wild.

You are following a long tradition.

What is newer, however, is that insects are kept specifically to serve as food for people and fodder for animals.

That should change, among other things through World Bank pilot projects for the factory farming of crickets, mealworms and flies.

Winand von Petersdorff-Campen

Business correspondent in Washington.

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The World Bank sees this as a promising method of ensuring a sustainable, climate-friendly diet with proteins, especially in Africa. That emerges from a report that has now been published. Development experts believe that the challenge of keeping the continent's rapidly growing population fed up cannot be met with conventional farming methods alone. Africa is considered to be the part of the world that is feeling the effects of climate change particularly strongly and therefore cannot afford to produce food, which is dependent on a lot of water.

One solution is insect farms.

There are already around 1000 of them on the continent. Around 2000 insects are considered edible, in some parts insects are part of the traditional diet, but most are caught in the wild.

According to the World Bank, 18 species have so far been identified as suitable for animal husbandry.

Among them, crickets, mealworms and the black soldier fly stand out, which are already bred on many farms around the world.

South Korea is the market leader with more than 2500 farms on which insects are raised for consumption, as animal feed or for medicinal products.

The market is growing fast

According to the World Bank, the market is growing rapidly. In Africa, however, it is still in its infancy. Most farmers do the keeping on the side or limit themselves to collecting insects. The report mentions the company Faso Pro from Burkina Faso. It sells special dried caterpillars in 75- and 150-gram packs as a snack and salty cookies baked with the flour of the dried caterpillars.

Faso Pro has trained 500 women who collect around 15 tons of the caterpillars every year. In Kenya, the Danish aid organization Dan Church Aid set up a small pilot farm after a few failures, which breeds crickets and shows people in a refugee camp how to successfully copy the attitude. In some regions crickets have long been consumed in powder form as a healthy food additive or also fed to pets.

The greatest hopes, however, rest on the black soldier fly and its larva. The insect is particularly suitable for factory farming because it grows quickly, is robust against diseases, does not sting itself and above all: it eats almost everything. The soldier fly attacks organic waste of all kinds and converts it into fertilizer. Its larvae are used as protein feed for pigs, chickens and fish in aquaculture, thus replacing soy and fish meal. Soy feed is associated with the deforestation of ecologically important forests, fishmeal with the overfishing of the world's oceans. In addition to these ecological benefits, the fly farms could help poor countries to import fewer agricultural goods.

Juergen Voegele, World Bank Vice-President for Sustainable Development, says that the farms are part of “a promising menu of solutions” that help countries make their agriculture more sustainable and lower in emissions.