Southern Madagascar is experiencing severe hunger as food supplies have almost completely vanished, resulting in a full-fledged nutrition emergency. People have resorted to extreme measures such as consuming locusts, raw red cactus fruits, and wild leaves in order to survive. For the first time, pockets with the highest levels of Acute Food Insecurity – IPC phase 5 or “Catastrophe” – have been identified, signalling a worsening of hunger.
People are fleeing their villages to reach urban centres in order to avoid the effects of food shortages caused by years of drought, infertile land, insecurity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. 3,000 people have driven hundreds of kilometres to get there.
Unexpected sandstorms have covered croplands and pastures, risking any chance of obtaining food. Large areas of arable land have been turned into wasteland.
The nutrition situation among children under the age of five is deteriorating to alarming levels, putting children’s lives in jeopardy. Acute malnutrition has nearly doubled in the last four months, from 9 to 16 percent in the majority of the southern districts. According to the Ministry of Health Survey from March 2021, the number of children admitted for care for extreme acute malnutrition in the Grand Sud quadrupled over the five-year average in the first quarter of 2021- WFP
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