Madagascar facing ‘world’s first climate change famine’
The mother of four shakes the grubby plastic jerrycan and sighs. “It’s not really enough,” she says, gesturing first to the almost empty five-litre container, then the skinny children peering through the doorway.
“I just want them to have a full belly and go to school, but that feels like a stretch – we don’t have enough food,” she says. “All I can do is hope for rain.”
Not so long ago, water was plentiful in this hot and arid part of southern Madagascar, an island some 250 miles off the coast of Africa. Then the drought descended.
In the past two to three years the price of water has jumped 300 per cent, in a region where 91 per cent of people earn less than $1.90 (£1.45) a day. Incomes here are inconsistent, but a family selling two to three bags of charcoal a month could expect to earn between 20,000 and 30,000 Malagasy ariary – £3.80 to £5.70.
Horariby and her children have a choice: they either trudge 12 kilometres on foot to collect water from the nearest large town, or buy it at twice the price from a cattle-drawn cart that comes to her village, piled high with yellow jerrycans.
“First prices doubled and then they doubled again,” Horariby says, perched on a plain sisal mat inside her sparse home on the outskirts of Marofoty.
The World Health Organisation says a person needs a minimum of 20 litres of water a day; but to buy that much for her family of six could take 40 per cent of Horariby’s monthly income.
The escalating cost of water is just one example of the crisis facing roughly three million people living in Le Grand Sud, a vast, hard-to-reach region in the grip of the most intense drought the country has experienced in more than four decades.
The scenery in this part of Madagascar is not the lush jungle many associate with the island nation.
Once-major rivers are now little more than channels of sand, snaking through a semi-arid landscape where few plants except prickly cactus can thrive. Everywhere locals speak of the kéré – or hunger – as the crops they rely on wither in the dry soil.
According to the United Nations the situation is at risk of spiralling into the “first climate change famine on Earth”.
Already about 1.3 million people are experiencing severe food insecurity as the drought has decimated the harvests that they rely on for both their food and income.
In the remote, sand-strewn village of Befamata, Sagina’s stained fingertips are a mark of the measures locals have taken to survive. The grandmother is now almost entirely reliant on raketa mena, or red cactus, a slightly sweet, prickly fruit that her family forage alongside any edible green leaves they can get their hands on.
“When the rain was still falling we didn’t need the cactus fruit,” Sagina says. “Now nothing else will grow. So what else do you want us to eat?”
Hunger has never been far away in Le Grand Sud, one of the poorest and least developed parts of Madagascar.
But while the area has always been prone to drought, the scale of the current crisis is “unprecedented”, says Dr Soja Lahimaro, the governor of Androy region.
“I don’t want to scaremonger, but the situation is going from bad to worse,” he warns.
“The cactus are supposed to be the last resort. I was born and raised here, and I’ve never before seen people eating the leaves of the cactus, or people reliant on its fruits.”
The professor-turned-politician, who spent eight years studying and teaching in China and the Netherlands, says the situation demonstrates the harsh reality of life on the front line of global warming. “The climate change effect, in my opinion, is no longer a myth,” he says. “It’s normal, it’s real.”
Madagascar, an island responsible for only 0.01 per cent of global CO2 emissions, is consistently ranked as one of the 10 countries most
‘I want them to have a full belly and go to school, but that feels like a stretch. All I can do is hope for rain’
vulnerable to climate change. Experts say that while natural climate fluctuations caused the current drought, it has been amplified by global warming.
“If you look over the last six years, there’s really been an exceptional set of back-to-back droughts in southern Madagascar,” says Dr Chris Funk, director of the Climate Hazards Center at UC Santa Barbara.
Bar 2018-2019, rainfall levels between November and February have been “well below” average – falling from 750mm in 2014-2015 to around 400mm in the past two years.
But other factors have contributed to the situation, especially deforestation: 90 per cent of Madagascar’s rainforests have been lost to logging, charcoal production or slash-and-burn agriculture.
This has caused extensive soil degradation across Le Grand Sud.
Mahatratse, a member of an agricultural co-operative near the hard-hit town of Amboasary, says that just 400 of the 1,400 hectares of land farmed by the group remains fertile.
Deforestation is also behind the rise of the tio-mena, or red wind, the vicious sandstorms that coat everything in a layer of ochre dust, and smother any seeds and saplings that germinate.
“The sandstorms are one of the things that’s killing us slowly, they’re destroying the soil… and it’s really a new phenomenon,” says Dr Lahimaro.
Yet deforestation and global warming are unfolding against a backdrop of underdevelopment, corruption and the economic fallout from Covid-19 restrictions, which has left people here with no safety net in the face of severe climate shocks.
Just reaching the deep south is a challenge. Driving from the capital, Antananarivo, to Ambovombe (the largest city in Androy) is a 620-mile, three-day trip in a 4x4 – much of it along unpaved, pot-hole ridden roads.
The consequences of poverty are all too apparent in the overcrowded prison in central Ambovombe. Penned in by burgundy walls topped with barbed wire, 378 people are held in a complex built to house just 99.
The prison director, Franco Ran dr ian as and rat ra, walks past the watch tower and unlocks a series of heavy metal doors to unveil a small courtyard, where men are hunched together on the dusty concrete floor.
He points out a lanky teenager in the throng, here because he stole a chicken for his hungry family.
“It’s really sad, because I think we would all do the same thing for our family,” the governor Dr Lahimaro says. “I would do the same thing.”
There are, however, some projects underway which aim to provide more long-term security, such as a paved road to connect Ambovombe to the rest of the country, and pipelines to bring water to Androy
“The problems here are multisectoral, so the solutions must be too,” says Dr Lahimaro. “But we cannot just rely on food distribution. [People] here are resilient and hardworking, we just need opportunity.”