“The situation is very worrying”, underlined Aduino Mangoni, deputy director of the World Food Program.
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Global warming is the cause of the famine that is hitting Madagascar. This is what declared Aduino Mangoni, Deputy Director of the World Food Program at a UN briefing in Geneva, Tuesday, November 2. According to him, 30,000 people are now suffering from famine in the southern half of the island hit by an unprecedented drought for forty years, and more than 1.3 million inhabitants suffer from acute malnutrition.
“The situation is very worrying”, he said, describing children, “who have only skin on their bones “ whom he met at a nutrition center on a recent trip to the worst-affected region. It is “the only famine linked to climate change on Earth”, he insisted, stressing that those which now strike Yemen, South Sudan and the Ethiopian region of Tigray are all caused by armed conflicts.
The next harvest can only take place in six months and the situation can only deteriorate by then, he warned, recalling that 500,000 children are already suffering from malnutrition in Madagascar. Among them, 110,000 are suffering from a severe or acute form of malnutrition, which puts their lives at risk.
In the southern tip of the island, 91% of the population is in serious economic difficulty and the drought has destroyed the agricultural and fishing production capacities on which families depend for their survival, a recent report by Amnesty International noted. .