Hunger, in southern Africa there is a daily struggle to survive the lack of food which now affects over 24 million people

ROMA – A battle on two fronts: it is the one that millions of people face every day in southern Africa, between Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, due to hunger and alternating droughts and floods due to climate change. Malawi has 19 million inhabitants, six million in Zambia, three million in Zimbabwe and another three million in Mozambique: for all these countries theIntegrated Food Security Classification (IPC) reports worrying levels of hunger, including lack of food supplies, inflation and the difficulty for people to obtain nutritious food every day. Meanwhile in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, the floods caused by the passage of the tropical storm Philip they killed more than 130 people, destroyed over two million hectares of crops and damaged over seven thousand homes and public infrastructure such as roads, schools and hospitals.

Living with hunger. To react to the food crisis, people have started to resort to mechanisms that are counterproductive to their health and survival itself, such as skipping meals or selling the few things they own. “Last week we fasted for a whole day and the next day we only ate porridge,” a woman from Chikwawa, Malawi, tells the NGO’s humanitarian workers Oxfam. In Zambia, Malawi and central Mozambique, extreme drought caused by He Niño – the atmospheric phenomenon which causes overheating of the waters of the Pacific Ocean and whose effects are felt by the entire planet but in particular by countries dependent on agriculture and fishing – has destroyed over two million hectares of crops, including maize which is a major source of livelihood for many of the peoples living in southern Africa. The governments of Malawi and Zambia have declared a state of emergency and it is the fourth consecutive year that Lilongwe has declared a state of disaster due to the impact of adverse weather conditions.

Some fundamental reasons behind hunger

Poverty. It is this – trivially, according to a prospectus released by ActionAid – the main cause of the hunger that afflicts the continent, where 90% of the people in the world live in poverty: in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. All the studies on the future evolution of this planetary tragedy tell us that the disparities between Africa and other parts of the world will increase in the coming years, with an even more unbalanced distribution of poverty.

Weather conditions. Some areas of the African continent, in particular East Africa and Southern Africa, are periodically subject to natural disasters such as floods, very long periods of drought and tropical storms. Natural disasters that destroy fields and crops, and cause the death of flocks and herds. The consequence can only be the lack of food and, therefore, hunger.

If food becomes one of the weapons in conflicts. The jihadist convulsions of Boko Haram in Nigeria, the war in Suda and in the Darfur region, the civil war in Somalia, the crisis in Libya and, lastly, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, have caused very serious effects on the populations of the Horn Africa. In war, food becomes a weapon. Soldiers often destroy their enemies’ food supplies. The fields are strewn with mines and the water sources are polluted.

Food waste in this part of the world. Every year, 1.3 tonnes of food is wasted worldwide, equal to a third of global production. Only by recovering this food and then redistributing it to those in need, would it be possible to feed millions of people.

You pollute less but you pay more. Despite contributing a small fraction of global carbon dioxide emissions, this portion of southern Africa has become the focus of the climate problem, where the effects of alternating droughts and floods produce the most serious damage. Since 2018, Mozambique, which is responsible for only 0.2 percent of emissions, has been hit around twenty times by cyclones and tropical storms. Citizens, especially the most vulnerable whose lives depend on fishing, livestock and small-scale agriculture, pay the highest price as they lose homes, crops and livelihoods and governments do not have enough resources to help them rebuild. Cyclone Freddy, for example, which swept across the southern Indian Ocean, caused $1.5 billion in damage in Mozambique and $500 million in Malawi.

The effects of El Niño. A recent report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documents that Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe recorded their lowest rainfall in forty years between February and March 2024. El Niño in southern Africa drives humanitarian needs. Its effects: drought, erratic rainfall, floods and high temperatures, vary in different areas within countries, but in general all of southern Africa has had a dry season. The consequences on people’s lives are serious, including water scarcity, decreased harvests and, consequently, lack of food, displacement and increase in diseases linked to poor sanitary conditions. The region is already experiencing several cholera outbreaks while the spread of other diseases such as yellow fever and malaria increases with the heat.

The children. 3.5 million children already need nutritional therapies, while over 900 thousand are being treated for severe malnutrition in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Malawi, Namibia, Madagascar, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Lesotho. In southern Africa – writes OCHA – around 21 million children under five are stunted: a sharp increase compared to the 18.6 million reported in 2022. Even where food is available, inflation prevents many from having a healthy diet healthy and complete. Many families today are forced to choose: feed their children or educate them. But when children stop going to school they become more vulnerable to child labor, early marriage and recruitment into armed groups.