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Madagascar: How Climate Change Contributed to Madagascar's Food Crisis
The Conversation Africa, 9 September 2021
The UN has announced that Madagascar is on the brink of experiencing the world's first "climate change famine". Tens of thousands of people are suffering "catastrophic" levels of… Read more »
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Madagascar: Country Faces One of the World's First Climate Change Famines, Experts Say
Thomson Reuters Foundation, 7 September 2021
As the African island nation experiences a food-security crisis driven by global warming, researchers say it is an alarm bell for the world Read more »
Madagascar Faces Famine Driven by Global Warming
Food experts have said there is no single factor behind Madagascar's crisis, but that worsening droughts linked to climate change, alongside a fragile food system and the economic impacts of Covid-19 have all played a role.
While droughts are not new to Madagascar, the severity of the current drought has been heightened by extreme climate shocks, the experts said.
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, in its first U.N. science report, said in August 2021, that the country has experienced increased aridity and that human-induced climate change is the main driver of Africa's rising surface temperature.
Humanitarian agencies say that the Covid-19 pandemic has interrupted supply chains, increased unemployment and curbed access to food markets. Subsistence farmers have been so badly affected that aid charity Médecins Sans Frontières has said that many are eating insects and cactus leaves to survive.
Inadequate health facilities, poor sanitation and scarce, unsafe drinking water supplies have exacerbated an already vulnerable situation, according to the United Nations Children's Fund.
The community in Maroalomainty in the south of Madagascar has planted vegetation to mitigate the effects of climate change.
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Africa: Protecting Plants Will Protect People and the Planet
IPS, 26 July 2021
Back-to-back droughts followed by plagues of locusts have pushed over a million people in southern Madagascar to the brink of starvation in recent months. In the worst famine in… Read more »
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Africa: Global Food Prices Fall for the First Time in 12 Months
FAO, 8 July 2021
FAO Food Price Index fell by 2.5 percent in June, after a year of consecutive increases Read more »
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Madagascar: Madagascar - Can Finding Food Alternatives Save the Endangered Lemur?
RFI, 26 June 2021
Anthropologists studying endangered lemurs in Madagascar are working with local communities to support the farming of alternative proteins -- as a study shows families hunt on… Read more »
InFocus
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It is estimated that more than a million people face hunger in the country's worst drought in decades. An immediate and massive increase in food aid is urgently needed for ... Read more »
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Severe hunger caused by climate change continues to affect southern Madagascar, writes Shelley Thakral for the World Food Programme. People are living through the worst droug Read more »
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Severe droughts and floods have had a devastating impact on Madagascar's rural poor, who are reliant on small-scale farming or fishing. Water levels are rising each year and weat Read more »
