Lake Chad Basin ecological crisis fuels famine
CRITICAL investments in agriculture and climate change relief are needed to address the crisis in Africa’s strife-torn Lake Chad Basin, where hunger, poverty and a lack of rural development prevail, the UN food security agency says.
“This is not only a humanitarian crisis, but it is also an ecological one,” José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said this week.
He underscored that the crisis is rooted in decades of neglect, lack of rural development and the impact of climate change, and the only way to ensure a lasting solution is to address these, including through sustainable agriculture.
“This conflict cannot be solved only with arms. This is a war against hunger and poverty in the rural areas of the Lake Chad Basin,” stressed Da Silva.
The crisis is part of an arc of hunger and violence threatening 20 million people as it stretches across Africa into the Middle East. It extends from Nigeria in the west, where Boko Haram’s six-year jihadist insurgency has forced two million people to flee their homes, to Yemen in the east, where warring factions block aid while children starve.
Between them lie Somalia’s parched sands and the swamps of oil-rich South Sudan, where starving families fleeing three years of civil war survive on water-lily roots. Parts of South Sudan are already suffering famine, the first in six years.