Battered by three intense cyclones in the space of a year, southeast Madagascar is experiencing the knock-on effect of those climatic disasters: “catastrophic” hunger in remote, inaccessible areas that is gaining little international attention, humanitarian groups say.
Cyclone Batsirai hit in February 2022, followed two weeks
later by Cyclone Emnati. Then, Cyclone Freddy made landfall on the Indian Ocean
island in February of this year. The combined impact left 60%-90% of farming
areas in the southeast badly damaged and food crops largely destroyed,
according to a report by UNICEF and Madagascar’s National Office for Nutrition.
The suffering is felt by people like Iavosoa, a desperate
young mother whose 10-month-old daughter, Soaravo, was at risk of not living to
see her first birthday because of acute malnutrition. Iavosoa, who only gave
her first name to protect her privacy, also has a 3-year-old son suffering from
moderate malnutrition.
A team from the humanitarian organization Doctors of the
World brought her children and two other badly malnourished children, both
under age 2, to a hospital in the city of Mananjary on Madagascar’s east coast
last month after a group of parents and their children were found walking
through the bush to try to reach the nearest health center.
At the hospital, Soaravo moaned weakly as her mother rocked
the baby in her arms to soothe her. The child weighed barely 2 kilograms (4.4
pounds) and had the appearance of an infant born prematurely, her eyes almost
too big for her tiny skull. At her age, she should weigh four to six times
more, doctors said.
“If my daughter is in this state, it’s because we don’t have
enough food where we live,” Iavosoa said. “I had dysentery for two months. I
had almost no milk. I was exhausted. The first basic health center is three
hours’ walk from my village. I could not treat myself. ... I was unable to
travel such a distance.”
“And then she (Soaravo) got sick, too. And then Cyclone
Freddy came. (It) ravaged our village and completely destroyed our house,” she
said.
Iavosoa, who said she wasn’t sure of her own age but thought
she was between 21 and 24, wore a torn T-shirt and a piece of fabric wrapped
around her waist. She had no shoes. Everything she owned was wrapped up in a
cloth bundle on the hospital floor. She is a single mother.
With a look of dismay on her face, Iavosoa glanced at her
little girl. “She just turned 10 months old,” she said.
The families found walking about 30 miles from the hospital
were discovered by chance when a Doctors of the World team went to evaluate the
state of health facilities in areas outside Mananjary, said Joaquin Noterdaeme,
a coordinator with the group known by its French name, Médecins du Monde.
Soaravo was treated for an infection and diarrhea and
received a special milk formula to address the malnutrition. Doctors said she
would have to stay in the hospital for at least a month. Her mother and brother
lived with her there because they had nowhere to go.
More than a quarter of the population in the southeastern
region of Madagascar, approximately 870,000 people, don’t have enough food and
are at risk of hunger, according to the Feb. 28 report by UNICEF and the
National Office for Nutrition.
Soaravo and the other hospitalized children are a drop in
the ocean, aid groups say.
“This is a nutrition emergency clearly,” Jean-Francois
Basse, the UNICEF representative in Madagascar said, calling the situation in
rural areas “catastrophic.”
The hospital where doctors worked to save Soaravo’s life
also bears the scars of the cyclones. Some of its buildings are little more
than a shell. The walls were just about standing, but parts of the roof were
gone. Some patients were treated in a tent outside.
In and around Mananjary, which took the brunt of the
cyclones roaring in from the Indian Ocean and where Freddy made landfall, few
trees stand upright. The cyclones ripped them out or left them lurching at
45-degree angles, revealing the force of the wind the storms carried.
Homes were destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again.
People living in remote districts like coastal Nosy-Varika
and the mountainous region of Ikongo were extremely vulnerable to hunger before
the cyclones, and children across southeast Madagascar experienced chronic
malnutrition, according to Brian Willett, head of mission in Madagascar for
Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières.
“But with the repeated climate shocks of the past year,
their resilience has been exceeded,” he said. “Today, 1 in 4 children is
acutely malnourished. Without medical support, these children are at risk of
dying.”
Mothers who couldn’t feed their children might engage in
“acts of desperation,” Willett said, referring to reports that some were
selling their children in hopes of saving them from hunger. -AP
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