Back-to-back droughts in southern Madagascar are driving 400,000 people to starvation and have already caused a number of deaths, the UN World Food Program said.
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Lola Castro, WFP’s regional director for southern Africa, told a news conference on Friday that she witnessed “a very dramatic and desperate situation” during her recent visit to the Indian Ocean island nation of 26 million people.
Hundreds of adults and children were “wasted” and hundreds of children were skin and bones and received nutritional support, she said.
In 28 years working for WFP on four continents, Castro said she “never saw anything so bad” except in 1998 in Bahr el-Gazal in what is now southern Sudan.
The UN and Madagascar’s government are launching an appeal for about $ 155 million to provide life-saving food and to prevent a major famine, she said. Thousands of people have left their homes in rural areas and moved to more urban environments in search of food, she added.
WFP chief David Beasley tweeted on Friday that 400,000 people are “marching towards hunger”, 14,000 are “in starvation-like conditions” and “if we do not act ASAP, the number of people facing starvation will reach 500,000 in a few short months. ”
“Families have been living on raw red cactus fruits, wild leaves and grasshoppers for several months now,” he said Wednesday.
“This is not due to war or conflict, it is due to climate change,” Beasley stressed. “This is an area in the world that has not contributed to climate change, but now it is they who are paying the highest price.”
According to the WFP, 1.14 million people in southern Madagascar do not have enough food, and 14,000 of them are in a “catastrophic” state, and this will double to 28,000 in October.
Madagascar is the only country that is not in conflict but still has people facing “Famine-Humanitarian Disaster” in the Integrated Food Security Class, known as the IPC, which is a global partnership with 15 UN agencies and international humanitarian organizations using five categories to measure food safety, Castro said.
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