More than a million people in southern Madagascar are struggling to find enough food over what the World Food Programme (“WFP”) says could be the first famine brought about by climate change.
The region has been hit hard with consecutive years of severe drought, which have forced families in rural communities to take desperate measures only to survive.
Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island, boasts a unique eco-system which includes wildlife and plants nowhere else in the world.
The south of Madagascar has a dry season typically from May to October and a rainy season beginning in November.
Climate change has broken the cycle, however, and met with consequences for farmers and their neighbors, Alice Rahmoun, director of the Rural WFP communications in the capital Antananarivo, told U.N. News on Thursday.
Rahmoun was recently in Southern Madagascar where WFP and its partners are providing aid to hundreds of thousands of people in the short and long term.
The situation is even worse, because, she continued, even the cactus is dying of drought, the lack from rain and the lack of water, so it is really a great issue.
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