Amnesty warns Madagascar's famine should be a climate 'wake-up call'

Amnesty International urged global leaders to act urgently to address the crisis in Madagascar, where four consecutive droughts in the south have severely challenged access to food, resulting in 1.14 million people with acute food insecurity, and 14,000 in a state of “catastrophe” — the most extreme category under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system. The United Nations has said the country is on the brink of experiencing the world’s first climate change famine.

In its recent report, “It will be too late to help us once we are dead,” Amnesty said the prolonged drought in the Grand Sud, or the Deep South, has impacted people’s human rights by exposing them to hunger, malnutrition, and death.

“Madagascar is on the frontline of the climate crisis,” Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said in a statement, noting that projections indicate droughts are expected to become more severe, disproportionately affecting people in developing countries.

“This is a wake-up call for world leaders to stop dragging their feet on the climate crisis,” she said.

The island nation is among the 10 countries most vulnerable to disasters and is considered to be the most cyclone-exposed country in Africa, according to the World Food Programme. The current drought has led to a severe reduction in harvests of staple foods such as rice and cassava, as well as livestock deaths, and the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates show that 95% of those facing acute food insecurity in southern Madagascar rely on crop farming, livestock, and fishing.

“What we found on the ground was really really shocking and the most affected … are women and children,” said Muleya Mwananyanda, Amnesty’s deputy director for southern Africa. A farmer interviewed by Amnesty said 10 people had died a month earlier in his village, and that five people from the same household had died of hunger in one day, while another woman said she had lost two children to hunger.

Amnesty’s interviews with community members highlighted that food is now more expensive with fewer choices available. “Most households eat once a day, some try to make a second meal out of cactus leaves during the day, others have to go without eating for more than a day at a time,” the report said.

Children have been severely impacted by the drought. UNICEF projects the number of acutely malnourished children is likely to quadruple since their last assessment in October 2020. Half a million children under the age of 5 are expected to be acutely malnourished.

“They have nothing to survive now because they can’t grow any food,” Marie Christina Kolo, an environmental activist from Madagascar, said at a press briefing. “Imagine if you were a parent and you don’t have enough to provide for your children.”

While there are no official statistics on the number of people who have died because of the drought, Amnesty’s interviews also indicate that people are dying from hunger.

Kolo said that there is a need to invest in solutions for local communities that emphasize innovation. The southern region of the country is chronically underfunded and under-resourced by the government, the report said. The latest national poverty census also found that poverty incidence and poverty intensity rates were higher in the south than the national average.

Poverty is a big factor that makes people in the region more vulnerable to climate change, said Mandipa Machacha, one of the researchers for the report.

“While extreme poverty affects all places in Madagascar, the southern part of the country experiences high rates of poverty in comparison to the central and northern regions,” she said at a press briefing, noting that 91% of people in the region live below the poverty line.

Amnesty urged the international community to increase humanitarian assistance and funding to the people affected by the drought and asked high-income countries to provide additional financial and technical support. It also urged the global community to address the climate crisis, which it said is the root cause of the situation in Madagascar.

“We can no longer accept that the poorest, most marginalized groups in society are the ones paying the highest price for the actions and the failures of the world’s biggest emitters of carbon dioxide,” Callamard said.“The international community must step up and ensure everyone can enjoy their right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.”

Amnesty said world leaders must rapidly cut emissions to avoid additional climate-driven humanitarian crises.

“If we do nothing,” Mwananyanda said, “there will be nothing to save in Madagascar or anywhere else.”