The southern African nation of Malawi has declared a state of disaster in 23 of the country’s 28 regions due to drought, with the president saying the country urgently needs more than $200 million in humanitarian aid, less than a month after neighboring Zambia There is also a call for help.
Malawi is the latest country in the region to see food supplies disrupted by severe drought linked to the El Niño weather phenomenon.
A third country, Zimbabwe, has also suffered major crop losses and is considering following suit, underscoring concerns raised by the United Nations World Food Program late last year that many countries in southern Africa were on the brink of a hunger crisis due to the impact. El Niño phenomenon.
Even before one of the driest periods in decades, nearly 50 million people in parts of southern and central Africa faced food insecurity, the World Food Program said.
The U.S. government’s aid agency, USAID, said more than 20 million people in southern Africa will be in urgent need of food aid by early 2024, partly due to El Niño.
Last month was the driest February in 40 years in Zambia and Zimbabwe, while parts of Malawi, Mozambique and Angola experienced “severe rainfall deficiencies”, according to the World Food Programme’s seasonal monitoring.
Millions of people in southern Africa survive on the food they grow. Corn, the region’s staple food, has been severely affected by drought.
El Niño is a natural, recurring weather phenomenon involving warming sea surfaces in parts of the Pacific Ocean. It has an impact on global weather, including causing below-average rainfall in southern Africa. Some scientists say climate change is exacerbating El Niño and making its effects more extreme.
The 2015-2016 El Niño also brought severe drought to southern Africa, the worst in the region in 35 years, according to the United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs.
Humans are not the only ones affected, conservation officials in Zimbabwe reported the rare incident of at least 100 elephants dying in national parks late last year after drought caused waterholes to dry up.
Before Malawi and Zambia declared national disasters, the World Food Program and USAID had launched a program to provide food to 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe facing food insecurity – nearly 20% of the country’s population.
British charity Oxfam said this month that more than 6 million people in Zambia, or 30% of its population, currently face severe food shortages and malnutrition with a year until the next growing season.
Malawi President Chakwera said that he is inspecting the severity of the drought crisis in the country. The government’s preliminary assessment found that about 44% of Malawi’s corn crops have failed or been affected, and 2 million households have been directly affected. affected. He said the country of 20 million people needed about 600,000 tons of food aid and called on the international community to help.
Malawi has been repeatedly hit by extreme weather in recent years, underlining how some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries are feeling the worst impacts of climate change despite contributing the least to global emissions.
Last year, Cyclone Freddie killed hundreds of people in Malawi, one of a series of powerful hurricanes that have swept across southern Africa over the past five years.
In early 2022, tropical storms and flooding caused Malawi to experience its worst outbreak of the waterborne disease cholera. The months-long outbreak has killed more than 1,200 people, according to the World Health Organization. Zambia is also currently experiencing a severe cholera epidemic.
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