As Trump Denies Climate Change, Children Die
shoes to spoons to survive. “I feel so powerless as a mother, because I know how much I love my child,” she said. “But whatever I do just doesn’t work.”
The drought is also severe in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and a related drought has devastated East Africa and the Horn of Africa and is expected to continue this year. The United Nations World Food Program has urgently appealed for assistance, but only half the money needed has been donated.
The immediate cause of the droughts was an extremely warm El Niño event, which came on top of a larger drying trend in the last few decades in parts of Africa. New research, just published in the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, concludes that human- caused climate change exacerbated El Niño’s intensity and significantly reduced rainfall.
The researchers calculated that human contributions to global warming reduced water runoff in southern Africa by 48 percent and concluded that these human contributions “have contributed to substantial food crises.”
As an American, I’m proud to see U. S. assistance saving lives here. If it weren’t for U. S. A.I.D., the American aid agency, and nonprofit groups like Catholic Relief Services, far more cadavers would be piling up. But my pride is mixed with guilt: The United States accounts for more than one- quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions over the last 150 years, more than twice as much as any other country.
The basic injustice is that we rich countries produced the carbon that is devastating impoverished people from Madagascar to Bangladesh. In America, climate change costs families beach homes; in poor countries, parents lose their children.
In one Madagascar hamlet I visited, villagers used to get water from a well a three-hour walk away, but then it went dry. Now they hike the three hours and then buy water from a man who trucks it in. But they have almost no money. Not one of the children in the village has ever had a bath. Families in this region traditionally raised cattle, but many have sold their herds to buy food to survive. Selling pressure has sent the price of a cow tumbling from $300 to less than $100.
Families are also pulling their children out of school, to send them foraging for edible plants. In one village I visited, fewer than 15 percent of the children are attending primary school this year. One of the children who dropped out is Fombasoa, who should be in the third grade but now spends her days scouring the desert for a wild red cactus fruit. Fombasoa’s family is ready to marry her off, even though she is just 10, because then her husband would be responsible for feeding her. “If I can find her a husband, I would marry her,” said her father, Sonjona, who, like many villagers, has just one name. “But these days there is no man who wants her” — because no one can afford the bride price of about $32.
Sonjona realizes it is wrong to marry off a 10-year- old, but he also knows it is wrong to see his daughter starve. “I feel despair,” he said. “I don’t feel a man anymore. I used to have muscles; now I have only bones. I feel guilty, because my job was to care for my children, and now they have only red cactus fruit.”
Other families showed me how they pick rocks of chalk from the ground, break them into dust and cook the dust into soup. “It fills our stomachs at least,” explained Limbiaza, a 20-year- old woman in one remote village. As it becomes more difficult to find chalk, some families make soup from ashes from old fires.
Scientists used to think that the horror of starvation was principally the dying children. Now they under- stand there is a far broader toll. “If children are stunted and do not receive the nutrition and attention in these first 1,000 days, it is very difficult to catch back up,” noted Joshua Poole, the Madagascar director of Catholic Relief Services. “Nutritional neglect during this critical period prevents children from reaching their full mental potential.”
For the next half century, we will see students learning less in school and economies held back, because in 2017 we allowed more than a million kids to be malnourished just here in southern Africa. The struggling people of Madagascar are caught between their own corrupt, ineffective government, which denies the scale of the crisis, and overseas governments that don’t want to curb carbon emissions.
Whatever we do to limit the growth of carbon, climate problems will worsen for decades to come. Those of us in the rich world who have emitted most of the carbon bear a responsibility to help people like these villagers who are simultaneously least responsible for climate change and most vulnerable to it.
I saw programs here that worked. The World Food Program runs school feeding programs that use local volunteers and, at a cost of 25 cents per child per day, give children a daily meal that staves off starvation and creates an incentive to keep them in school.
We need these emergency relief efforts but we can also do far more to help local people help themselves. Catholic Relief Services provides emergency food aid, but it also promotes drought-resistant seed varieties and is showing farmers near the coast how to fish. It is also working with American scientists on technologies to supply water in Madagascar, using condensation or small-scale desalination.
For me, the most wrenching sight of this trip was of two starving boys near the southern tip of Madagascar. Their parents are climate refugees who fled their village, leaving the boys in the care of an aunt, even though she doesn’t have enough food for her own two daughters. I met the boys, Fokondraza, 5, and Voriavy, 3, in the evening, and they said that so far that day they hadn’t eaten or drunk anything (the closest well, producing somewhat salty water, is several hours away by foot, and fetching a pail of water becomes more burdensome when malnourished and anemic).
Their aunt, Fideline, began to prepare the day’s meal. She broke off cactus pads, scraped off the thorns and boiled them briefly, and the boys ate them — even though they provide little nutrition. “My heart is breaking because I have nothing to give them,” Fideline said. “I have no choice.”
At night, the boys sometimes cry from hunger, she said. But that is good. When a person is near starvation, every calorie goes to keeping the heart and lungs working. It is the children who don’t cry who are at greatest risk.
I don’t pretend solutions are straightforward. I flew halfway around the world and then drove for two days to get to these villages, pumping out carbon the whole way. Yet we do know what will help in the long run: sticking with the Paris agreement to limit global warming. We must also put a price on carbon and invest much more heavily in research on renewable energy.
In the short and medium term, we must step up assistance to climate refugees and sufferers, both to provide relief and to assist with new livelihoods that adjust to new climate realities. (For individuals who want to help, the organization most active in the areas I visited was Catholic Relief Services, which accepts donations for southern Madagascar.)
As the sun set, I told Fideline that there was a powerful man named Trump half a world away, in a country she had never heard of, who just might be able to have some impact, over many years, on the climate here. I asked her what she would tell him.
“I would ask him to do what he can, so that once more I can grow cassava, corn, black- eyed peas and sorghum,” she said. “We’re desperate.”