Antananarivo – The people of Madagascar are on the verge of despair. The south of the tropical island state, which lies near the east coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, is experiencing the worst drought in 30 years. There is no clean drinking water and hardly any food. For months people have lived on cactus fruits, clay mixed with tamarind juice, grasshoppers and leaves. Aid organizations speak of “catastrophic conditions”.
It has not rained at all or hardly at all in the region for four years. Nothing has grown in the fields for a long time. All that’s left is dusty earth. Rivers and lakes have dried up. Most of the farm animals died. The next rain is not expected until May – there are still seven months until then. If he comes this time.
According to the World Food Program (WFP), 1.14 million people in Madagascar are already dependent on emergency food aid. Around 135,000 children are acutely malnourished. By April the number will increase by half a million children. “We are at the beginning of the lean season. If the trend continues, 28,000 people are at risk of starvation, ”says WFP Madagascar spokeswoman Alice Rahmoun.
The helplessness is written on the faces of the residents. Some tried to kill themselves out of desperation, says the head of SOS Children’s Villages in Madagascar, Jean Francois Lepetit. The situation is particularly dramatic for children. “You look so bad. It hurts to talk about it alone. They are incredibly thin, ”says Lepetit.
Although periods of drought are a well-known phenomenon in the world’s second largest island nation, the need has worsened significantly this year due to climate change. Madagascar is located in the tropical climate of the south equatorial current, the precipitation decreases continuously from east to southwest. On the west coast, for example, only 500 millimeters fall per year, while on the east coast it can be up to 4,000 millimeters regionally. As early as 2015 and 2016, the drought in southern and eastern Africa led to the declaration of a state of emergency in several countries. In the south of Madagascar, the situation has not eased to this day.
Farmers eat their seeds – but then what about the next growing season?
Anyone who is struggling for daily survival here cannot afford to think about the future. Farming families have started to eat the seeds they wanted to plant. Aid organizations warn that this will create a dangerous vicious circle. Without seeds, farmers will not be able to grow anything in the next planting season from March onwards. Another famine in 2022 would already be programmed.
But Mosa Tovontsoa, a farmer and shepherd who lives in the southern village of Mitsangana, cannot even think that far. “It’s better to eat what little you have than to die,” says the 46-year-old father of eight. The need has never been as bad as this year. “We had droughts before, but only for a month or two. Then the rain came back and we could plant again, ”he recalls.
The lack of water is almost worse than the gnawing hunger, says Tovontsoa. “There is not a drop of water left in the Mandrare River. We have to dig deep in the river bed to get water, ”he reports. There has been no clean drinking water in his village for a long time, not even water for washing. “We have been wearing the same dirty clothes for months,” says Tovontsoa.
AFP
Queue in front of a MSF mobile clinic in the village of Befeno: this is where the most severe cases of malnutrition are treated.
Not only Madagascar is affected by an unusually severe drought. In many other parts of the world, more people are going hungry this year than usual. According to the United Nations, 41 million people are currently at risk of famine in 43 countries – a drastic increase compared to 27 million two years ago. Most at risk are 584,000 people in Ethiopia, Madagascar, South Sudan and Yemen, according to the UN. Hunger is also great in Burkina Faso, Chad and Nigeria.
According to aid organizations, an unfortunate combination of several factors is responsible for this: protracted armed conflicts, climate change, sandstorms, floods, the corona pandemic and economic downturns. There are also structural problems such as widespread poverty, high unemployment, poor governance, weak education systems and deforestation.
In southern Madagascar, where the famine is particularly acute, many people have already sold their belongings in order to buy the little food that is left on the markets. But prices have skyrocketed, and most goods are unaffordable. Aid organizations estimate that this year’s food production is up to 70 percent below the already low average of the last five years.
“We sold everything we had to eat,” says 17-year-old Enova, a farmer’s daughter from the village of Amboasary-Atsimo. Every now and then there is a sweet potato, but most of the time her family only eats bitter cactus fruits once a day. The medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) reports masses of completely destitute people. Some would have sold their cooking utensils and no longer even had containers to fetch water.
Since March, MSF teams have set up several mobile clinics to treat the most serious cases of malnutrition. “We see malnourished children who, after weeks of treatment in our mobile clinics, are struggling to gain weight again,” says the head of the emergency aid programs, Bérengère Guais. “The medical care we provide and the half rations that various organizations have distributed are not enough to reverse the trend. There is simply too little access to food. ”A massive increase in emergency food aid is an absolute priority. (with avo.)
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