By RFIPosted on 19-01-2020Modified on 19-01-2020 at 14:36

It is a sad and very disturbing record: 45 million people are threatened by famine in the countries of southern Africa. The World Food Program (WFP) is sounding the alarm.

It is a food crisis never seen before. Drought, floods and economic instability are the main factors, according to the finding of the United Nations agency.

Violence of climatic events

Cyclone Idai in Mozambique , drought in southern Madagascar, Zimbabwe and Namibia ... In recent months, weather events have been particularly severe in several countries in the south of the continent. These climatic phenomena are, moreover, aggravated by a very harsh economic situation. WFP is now taking a global look at these phenomena that have affected southern Africa and reports that 45 million people are today at risk of starvation.

It is a crisis of an unprecedented scale and the director general of WFP for this region of the world, Lola Castro, is very pessimistic because, she specifies, we will not solve the problem with food distributions.

" Catastrophic " year

“ In southern Africa, this year will be catastrophic due to the hot weather, the poor harvests and the bad rains. In addition to this, we have seen incredible cyclones in the past year, in addition to the economic crises in several countries in the region. The combination of all these factors - drought, floods, cyclones, economic crisis - is a problem that will not be solved with a food distribution of three or four months. In this region, we know that we will be much more affected than in many other regions of the world. And we can already see it… temperatures are going up and, in South Africa, it goes up twice compared to the rest of the world. It is a region really affected by climate change, ”said Lola Castro.

WFP plans to help 8.3 million food insecure people this year in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Madagascar, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Malawi.

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