Leader of Drought-Stricken Madagascar Urges UNGA to Take Tougher Action Against Climate Change
01:07 GMT 24.09.2021 (Updated: 11:18 GMT 24.11.2022)
© REUTERS / Justin Lane
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Malagasy President Andry Nirina Rajoelina urged the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday to take more urgent action in the fight against climate change. The Indian Ocean island nation is facing a catastrophic drought that the UN’s food program has warned could become the first climate change-driven famine.
"While the world was fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis also struck at full force," Rajoelina said in New York.
"Madagascar finds itself a victim of climate change,” he said. “There are recurrent waves of drought in the south. The water sources dry up and all the means of subsistence become almost impossible. My compatriots in the south are bearing the weight of climate change which they did not participate in creating.”
“In the fight against climate change, all our efforts will be in vain if the implementation of measures and sanctions to stop climate change continue to be lax,” Rajoelina said.”If we do not act, the crisis will continue and get worse. Madagascar calls upon each state to act in an equitable fashion and commensurate with their polluting activities."
According to World Bank data, Madagascar produces just 0.01% of the world’s annual carbon emissions, or 0.128 metric tons per capita.
The island’s climate is strongly dictated by the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, with its tropical eastern coast being bombarded by typhoons and monsoon rains driven westward by the trade winds. Its southern regions are more arid, getting what little moisture makes it over the central highlands.
However, for the past four years, a catastrophic and unprecedented drought has ravaged the massive island. Swarms of locusts, which devour what little produce remains, have only made the situation worse.
According to the UN World Food Program (WFP), 1.4 million people are food insecure due to crop failures and at least 30,000 people have been pushed to the agency’s highest level of famine, with the WFP warning that the number could soon rise dramatically, even quadrupling among children.
“These are people who live off the land, survive off the land, and have been displaced by drought. They’ve lost their livelihood, they’ve had to sell everything,” WFP spokesperson Shelley Thakral told Al Jazeera earlier this month.
“The situation has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. While some were looking for seasonal labour and tourism, there have not been any tourists coming into the country for the last 18 months,” she said.
“This is not because of war or conflict, this is because of climate change,” WFP Executive Director David Beasley said in June.
Several mothers the BBC spoke with last month described how their families were surviving by eating insects and cactus leaves.
"I clean the insects as best I can but there's almost no water," Tamaria, a mother of four, told the news agency. "My children and I have been eating this every day now for eight months because we have nothing else to eat and no rain to allow us to harvest what we have sown.”
In 2019, the US space agency NASA, which has specialized satellites in orbit for monitoring climate activity, warned that changes in ENSO-driven rainfall was creating drier and drier soils in southern Africa, threatening famine. Namibia, Angola and Zimbabwe have faced similar dry spells in recent years, causing them to struggle with crop failures and water shortages.
The relative underdevelopment of the former colonies, including Madagascar, is also a factor in their vulnerability to drought. Madagascar’s economy is heavily geared toward exporting cash crops like vanilla, which formed 20.3% of its exports in 2019, which was 80% of the world’s natural vanilla supply. That same year, its second-largest export was raw nickel, which requires huge amounts of water to mine.
Madagascar was a French colony from 1897 until 1960, when it regained independence. In the 1930s, it was considered by the Nazi German leadership as a possible deportation site for European Jews. In 1947, Malagasys mounted a major uprising against French rule, which was put down with mass executions and terror that included throwing victims from aircraft. An estimated 100,000 people were killed.
In 1975, a Marxist government achieved success for a time by nationalizing key industries, but changes in the global economy undercut their efforts. By 1982, Antananario was forced to accept loans and the associated neoliberal economic reforms mandated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which undermined further efforts at economic autonomy.
