The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN warned in May that locusts were breeding in thousands of areas south of the Atlas Mountains.

Delegations from the Union urged that specialists be trained to fight the locust threat.

Another issue is the encroachment of deserts into forested land.

In Mauritania, a country where three-quarters of the land mass is already desert, it is estimated that the Sahel desert is encroaching at the rate of seven kilometres a year.

The Maghreb Arab Union is made up of Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.