IMAGE: CNS photo/Shiraaz Mohamed, EPA
By Bronwen Dachs
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (CNS) —
Hunger levels are so severe in drought-ridden southern Madagascar that many
people in remote villages have eaten almost nothing but cactus fruit for up to
four years, said a Catholic Relief Services official.
Eating this fruit leaves crimson
stains on people’s faces and hands, and there is a “shame of poverty
associated with these stains in Madagascar,” an island nation 250 miles
off the coast of mainland Africa, said Nancy McNally, CRS information officer
for East and Southern Africa.
The cactus plant “is the
only thing that grows” in southern Madagascar, and the plants “are
growing everywhere” in earth “that looks like white silt,” she
said in a Nov. 23 telephone interview from Nairobi, Kenya.
A father of three, sitting with
his wife and children outside the town of Beloha in southeastern Madagascar, “told
me that his family had been living on cactus fruit for a year,” McNally
said.
“With whatever money he
could make” from finding something to sell, he would buy food for the
youngest child, she said, noting that “this would amount to a little bit
of rice once in a while for the boy, who was about a year old.”
“It’s the worst poverty I’ve
seen,” McNally said, noting that the severe drought in southern Madagascar
has led the U.N. to warn of potential famine, “a word that is very rarely
used for fear of raising a false alarm.”
The U.N. Food and Agriculture
Organization warned in late November that 330,000 people in southern Madagascar
are “on the verge of a food security catastrophe, next step being famine.”
In Antananarivo, Madagascar’s
capital, “begging is very aggressive,” McNally said, noting that “poverty
is very deep, and it seems that people’s survival instinct has kicked in.”
El Nino, a warming of sea surface
temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, has aggravated dry conditions in Madagascar
and the entire southern African region, where an estimated 39 million people
are affected by food shortages.
“I saw a baby so thin who
had already spent a month being fed” by the Daughters of Charity of St.
Vincent de Paul in the town of Tsihombe, Madagascar, McNally said.
Tsapasoa Fedraza’s 20-year-old
mother had taken him to the nuns, who run an emergency shelter in the town,
after neighbors in her nearby village put her in an oxcart and told her to get
him help before he died of malnutrition, she said.
His mother “didn’t have the
resources to get there on her own, which is the situation of so many people”
in southern Madagascar, she said.
More than 90 percent of
Madagascar’s population lives below the $2 a day poverty line, McNally said.
“People are dying in remote
villages,” such as Ajampaly, she said, noting that, “we don’t know
how bad it is.”
Poor or no infrastructure makes
it extremely difficult to reach remote areas in the south of the country,
McNally said.
“The chief in Ajampaly told
me that the closest water point” was about four-and-a-half miles away, and
most people have to walk to get water, she said.
“Those who suffer most are
people who don’t have family to help them — children and the elderly,” she
said. While there is some food in the markets in towns, “it is too
expensive for most people.”
The Daughters of Charity of St.
Vincent de Paul have “a pervasive network in the communities” of
southern Madagascar and are helping CRS provide food aid to the worst-hit
villages, she said.
Madagascar needs a much stronger
international response to this crisis, she said, noting that some areas of the
island have had no rain at all for four years.
“A 70-year-old man I talked
to said he had farmed with his father when he was young, and every year (they) had
a rainy season that could be counted on, but those times are gone and are not
coming back,” McNally said.
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