After years of drought, and with what little the people of Madagascar have managed to grow, destroyed by flashflooding, more than 1.3 million are in crisis - and some are even eating ground-up clay just to survive.
In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, WFP’s regional director for southern Africa, Lola Castro, explains how the UN agency is helping by empowering communities to withstand future climate shocks
Hunger is on the rise in southern Madagascar due to consecutive years of drought, affecting half the region’s population, or 1.5 million people, and forcing most families to eat insects, the World Food Programme (WFP) reported on Friday.
With drought in Somalia on the verge of affecting 2.2 million across the country - almost a fifth of the population - UN agencies are calling for urgent funds for critical livelihood support. Stressing that drought is causing crops to fail and livestock to die, OCHA’s Justin Brady said that not only livelihoods were at stake, but the whole centuries-old “identity” of pastoralists in the region.
Families in Afghanistan are being forced into debt, “making the difficult decision of using their children as collateral”, says the Chief of Communications for UNICEF in Afghanistan, Alison Parker.
People are “used to the suffering we see in Afghanistan,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director of Emergency and Rehabilitation, Dominique Burgeon says, and the country needs urgent support to combat a major crisis in the face of drought and conflict.
Drought in Afghanistan has left more than 3.6 million people “barely surviving” and displaced some 250,000 people from rural areas, the UN’s Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan said on Monday. Toby Lanzer told Daniel Johnson of UN News, that 2019 could be "make or break" for the country.
To strengthen resilience in the Horn of Africa against natural hazards like drought, which can lead to cattle losses and increased food insecurity, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is supporting pastoralists in northeastern Kenya’s Mandera County to grow pasture for livestock.
