Madagascar on brink of ‘the 1st famine caused by climate change’
Ben Adler·Senior Climate Editor, November 23, 2021
“The situation is really critical: Around 512,000 people are one step away from famine,” Shada Moghraby, a spokesperson for the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), told Yahoo News. Some families have been left with no alternative but to scavenge for food, including locusts.
“They’re at the highest level of food insecurity,” she said. “They’re at that stage where most of them are surviving on foods such as cactus fruit, which have hardly any nutritional value.”
Staple crops in Madagascar include rice, sugarcane, cassava and sweet potatoes, but five years of drought are taking a heavy toll.
“Every year [Madagascan] families, they’re jumping from one failed harvest to the next,” Moghraby said. “And it’s looking that the coming season as well, it’s going to be another poor harvest. So that is not only just impacting that people cannot grow enough to feed their families, let alone do business.”
Madagascar’s current drought is its worst in four decades. But while droughts have always been a threat to the country’s agricultural economy, scientists say that the frequency and severity of droughts there have been increased by climate change. Warmer temperatures, due to greenhouse gas emissions, cause more evaporation, leading to dried-out vegetation and intensified periods of low precipitation.
That’s why the U.N. warned in late October that Madagascar was on the precipice of “what could become the first famine caused by climate change.” The bleak milestone should not be taken to mean that climate change hasn’t factored into previous droughts. And food insecurity has been on the rise for years, driven in part by climate change.
“The number of extreme climate-related disasters, including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms, has doubled since the early 1990s, with an average of 213 of these events occurring every year during the period of 1990–2016,” the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization reported in 2018. “These disasters harm agricultural productivity of major crops such as wheat, rice and maize causing food price hikes and income losses that reduce people’s access to food.”
But full-blown famines are declared only when certain benchmarks are met, including when at least one-fifth of households face extreme food shortages, more than 30 percent of residents are suffering from acute malnutrition and at least one out of every 5,000 people per day are dying of starvation.
“Just because famine is not declared does not mean that people are not dying from starvation,” said Moghraby about Madagascar’s current state. “People may be dying from starvation, but that’s also connected to illness, so it’s not solely by starvation. Obviously, when you’re malnourished, then your chances of being vulnerable to diseases is much higher and therefore you don’t have the energy to fight those diseases. And we see that with the pandemic and COVID-19 putting people at a higher level of vulnerability because they’re food-insecure.”
While droughts and other climate-change-related disasters have contributed to previous famines, they typically arise in situations exacerbated by events like civil war or mass displacement.
“Unlike other crises where we have a high level of food insecurity, usually the cause of that is conflict — think about South Sudan or Yemen,” Moghraby said, referring to two other current crises. “But in southern Madagascar, it’s purely climate.”
There are also ongoing food shortages in countries such as Somalia caused partly by droughts, in addition to long-running political conflict.
“With about 2.3 million people already suffering with serious water, food and pasture shortages in Somalia, a rapidly worsening drought could lead to an ‘extreme situation’ by April next year,” the U.N. News agency reported last Friday. “Somalia is on the frontline of climate change and has experienced more than 30 climate-related hazards since 1990, including 12 droughts and 19 floods.”
Khadija Diriye, the Somali minister of humanitarian affairs and disaster management, told the U.N. that families are losing their livestock, which could lead to deadly starvation. “I am particularly worried about children, women, the elderly and disabled people who continue to bear the brunt of Somalia’s humanitarian crisis,” she said.
Like most victims of famine and other climate-change-related crises, Madagascans and Somalis are — simply by virtue of being poor — among those who have done the least to cause climate change. Madagascar’s 28 million residents create just 0.01 percent of annual carbon emissions. Collectively, the 48 countries and 1.14 billion residents of sub-Saharan Africa have contributed only 0.55 percent of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions. (The United States, with a population of 330 million, has produced 25 percent of historical emissions.)
Right now, the WFP says it needs $69 million to feed the more than 1 million people per month who need assistance in Madagascar. Over the long run, the organization says it wants to better equip farmers in developing nations to be prepared for climate-change-related extreme weather events, for example by having improved irrigation systems that can protect crop yields during droughts.
“These are people who have contributed nothing to climate change but are bearing the brunt of the impact of climate change,” Moghraby noted. That impact is going to grow, in Madagascar and throughout the world.
More photos from the crisis in Madagascar
