Barefoot in the water, Adamu Garba tries to assess what he can save from his harvest.

Of its rice fields, there is not much left, destroyed by the violent rains that have been falling for months in northern Nigeria.

Thousands of farms like his have been devastated this year by the monster floods that have hit West and Central Africa hard.

By destroying crops, these floods risk aggravating the food crisis affecting these extremely poor regions, already struggling with the fallout from the war in Ukraine, which has caused the price of fertilizers and food products to soar.

“It's excruciating, but there's nothing we can do, we just have to be strong,” sighs the Nigerian farmer from his plot on the outskirts of Kano town.

Normally, his rice fields produce about 200 bags of rice.

This season "I'm not sure I can collect half a bag," he says, annoyed.

“Thousands of farms have been destroyed,” laments Manzo Ezekiel, spokesperson for the Nigerian Crisis Management Agency (Nema).

“According to all our studies, we can link these rains to climate change”

In northern Nigeria alone, floods have killed more than 300 people and displaced at least 100,000 people, authorities said.

Although parts of Nigeria are prone to flooding during the rainy season, this year is the worst on record since 2012, when 363 people died and more than 2.1 million were displaced, Nema said.

"This toll will worsen further as torrential rains and flooding continue," the spokesperson added.

By mid-September, the rains had still not stopped.

In Niger, a border country, the rains caused the river of the same name to overflow, and the floods killed 159 people and affected more than 225,000, according to official figures.

This rainy season is thus one of the most devastating that the Sahelian country has ever known.

In neighboring Chad, the UN estimates that more than 622,500 people have been affected "at different levels" by the floods in more than half of the country, including the capital N'Djamena.



"According to all our studies, we can link these rains to climate change," says the director general of Niger's national meteorology, Katiellou Gaptia Lawan.

Over the years, “the rains are becoming more and more intense and extreme precipitation is increasing,” adds the specialist.

And the rains are only making an already dramatic situation worse.

Chad was already facing a serious food crisis, and the UN estimates that 5.5 million Chadians, or a third of the landlocked country's population, need urgent humanitarian assistance.

This is also the case in northern Nigeria, where more than a million children are at risk of hunger this year.

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