Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube

Ravaged by Climate Change: 400,000 On the Brink of Starvation in Madagascar

Over one million people in southern Madagascar are food insecure, while almost half a million are on the brink of starvation. Climate change is to blame, and capitalism ensures that the Global South will pay the highest price.

Otto Fors

July 2, 2021
Facebook Twitter Share
Photo: WFP/Jonathan Dumont

Over 1.1 million people in southern Madagascar are food insecure and 400,000 are on the brink of starvation as the country experiences its fourth straight year of drought. The agriculture-dependent region received just 50 percent of its typical rainfall during the October planting season, and consecutive years of failed harvests have led to the depletion of food and seed stocks. These factors indicate the prospects for the 2021 and 2022 harvesting seasons are even worse as climate change and capitalist exploitation push more Malagasy people into extreme hunger and poverty. 

Thousands in southern Madagascar have left their homes to find work in cities in response to these dire conditions. However, the coronavirus pandemic has caused the economy to contract by four percent and decimated the tourism sector, dashing workers’ hopes of a reprieve from their poverty. Those who remain in villages and rural areas often have to resort to desperate measures, subsisting on diets of red cactus fruit, wild leaves, termites, and locusts. 

Climate change is to blame for Madagascar’s plight. The country’s location and dependence on natural resources makes it particularly vulnerable to climate-related disruptions, while centuries of imperialism and resource extraction have ensured that the island’s poor are the most affected. David Beasley, executive director of the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), put it bluntly: “This is not because of war or conflict, this is because of climate change. This is an area of the world that has contributed nothing to climate change, but now, they’re the ones paying the highest price.” 

You might be interested in: Capitalism Is Destroying the Planet — Let’s Destroy Capitalism

The situation in Madagascar also highlights the ways in which the effects of climate change can compound and result in even greater devastation. The arid conditions caused by the drought are leading to dust and sand storms that devastate crops, kill cattle, and sweep away soil for cultivation. Once limited to the driest areas in certain parts of the year, the storms have now expanded their reach and occur nearly year-round. Crops on the island have also been destroyed by locusts. Warmer temperatures, combined with heavy rains in other regions, have caused record locust swarms, and climate change will only increase the frequency of these plagues across the world.

Madagascar is not alone: according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), Ethiopia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso are also “experiencing famine-like conditions” as climate change, conflict, and the economic fallout from the coronavirus wreak havoc on the lives of the working class in the Global South. Across the world, 41 million people in 43 countries are “knocking on famine’s door,” up from 27 million people in 2019. 

The drought in Madagascar and extreme weather events across the world expose the cruel injustice of climate change where those least responsible suffer the most devastating consequences. These countries face a double-whammy of climate change-induced destruction and centuries of resource depletion and exploitation due to imperialism. 

To avoid catastrophe, the global environmental struggle must be anti-capitalist. We must fight for a democratically run economy structured around human need and environmental sustainability, and demand justice for those in countries like Madagascar, who bear the burden of this ecological catastrophe. The Malagasy working class must also fight to resist their corrupt politicians who have sold off natural resources and destroyed over half of the island’s forests. Successive governments have turned a blind eye to violent land grabs by multinational companies while subordinating the needs of the working class to the International Monetary Fund

Capitalism, whether in Madagascar or around the world, cannot provide a solution for this ecological emergency of its own making. 

Facebook Twitter Share

Otto Fors

Otto is a college professor in the New York area.

Middle East-Africa

Women in Gaza: “Sleep Is a Luxury We Cannot Afford”

November 25 is the International Day Against Gender-Based Violence and organizations and activists from diverse countries around the world are calling to mobilize for  a Global Feminist Action for Palestine,

Andrea D'Atri

November 25, 2023

Palestinian Self-Determination and the Fight for Socialism

In this article, we discuss four different strategies for fighting for Palestinian Self-Determination and why we must fight for a workers' and socialist Palestine.

Josefina L. Martínez

November 24, 2023
A man stands in the wreckage of a home in the West Bank.

Dispatches from the West Bank

While Gaza faces bombardment, violence in the West Bank has also been escalating with little media attention. A Palestinian nurse from Nablus sends his dispatches from the West Bank chronicling the increasing targeting of and violence on Palestinians in this region.

Means and Ends: A Debate on the Left over Hamas’s Strategy

Support for the self-determination of the Palestinian people does not mean the revolutionary Left should refrain from criticizing the program, strategy, and methods of Hamas.

Matías Maiello

November 14, 2023

MOST RECENT

The World Kissinger Built Must Die Too

Henry Kissinger died at 100 years old. But his legacy remains in the brutal world system he built and the future generations of imperialist ghouls he inspired. They all must go.

Samuel Karlin

November 30, 2023

Fact Check: Did German Leftists Try to Bomb West Berlin’s Jewish Community Center in 1969?

Answer: No. The bombing was undertaken by West Germany’s domestic secret service, originally founded by Nazis.

Nathaniel Flakin

November 29, 2023
Protesters in NYC for Palestinian liberation.

Uniting Workers for Palestine Is a Fight for the Future of Labor

The struggle for Palestine shows the potential for the rank and file to push unions to break with imperialism and to build a new, combative, and internationalist unionism.

Tatiana Cozzarelli

November 27, 2023
Haverford College student Kinnan Abdalhamid and Brown University students Tahseen Ahmed and Hisham Awartani, Palestinian college students who were shot in Burlington, Vermont.

Haverford Faculty for Justice in Palestine Releases Statement Supporting Pro-Palestinian Students

Haverford College Faculty for Justice in Palestine have published a statement following the shooting of three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont.