Zimbabwe, neighbouring Zambia and Malawi, Botswana and Angola in the west, Mozambique and Madagascar in the east suffer from cycles of extreme weather with catastrophic consequences for the population, The Independent reported.
Drought in Zimbabwe, neighbouring Zambia and Malawi has reached extreme crisis levels, leading Zambia and Malawi to declare a national disaster. Zimbabwe risks being on the brink of the same situation. Drought has also reached Botswana and Angola in the west, and Mozambique and Madagascar in the east.
A year ago, much of this region was inundated by deadly tropical storms and floods. It’s a vicious weather cycle: one day too much rain, the next not enough. It’s a story of extreme climate events that scientists say are becoming more frequent and more devastating, especially terrible for the world’s most vulnerable populations.
In Mangwa, young and old alike queued for food: some carried everything they could find home on donkey-drawn carts, others on wheelbarrows.
One touching example is Zanyiwe Ncube, 39, who with the utmost concentration Zanyiwe Ncube poured her small portion of precious golden vegetable oil into a plastic bottle at a food aid distribution point deep in rural Zimbabwe, saying she does not want to “lose a single drop.”
Ncube and her 7-month-old son, whom she carried on her back, were among 2,000 people who received portions of vegetable oil, sorghum, peas and other supplies in the Mangwe district of southwestern Zimbabwe. Ncube is now usually harvesting crops – food for her, her two children and her niece, whom she also looks after. There might even be some extra for sale. According to the World Food Programme’s seasonal monitoring, Zimbabwe’s driest February in her lifetime has put an end to that. The food distribution is part of a programme funded by the US aid agency USAID and run by the UN World Food Programme.
The agencies aim to help some of the 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe who are at risk of starvation due to the drought that has gripped much of southern Africa since late 2023. survive, helped by the rainy season, as fewer and fewer can rely on crops and weather.
The United Nations Children’s Fund says eastern and southern Africa are experiencing “overlapping crises” of extreme weather, with both regions oscillating between storms and floods as well as heat and drought last year.
In southern Africa, some 9 million people, half of them children, need help in Malawi. According to UNICEF, more than 6 million people in Zambia, 3 million of them children, have been affected by the drought. That’s almost half of Malawi’s population and 30 per cent of Zambia’s population.
“Distressingly, extreme weather is expected to be the norm in eastern and southern Africa in the years to come,” said Eva Kadilli, UNICEF’s regional director.
Apart from anthropogenic climate change, which is already causing greater weather instability around the world, there is something else going on in southern Africa this year -El Niño. This is a natural climate phenomenon that warms parts of the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years, has a different effect on the world’s weather; in southern Africa, it means below-average rainfall and sometimes drought, which led to today’s disaster. As a result, people grow grain sorghum and millet, crops that are resistant to drought and give a chance for a harvest, but even they didn’t survive the conditions this year.
Francesca Erdelmann, the World Food Programme’s country director for Zimbabwe, said last year’s harvest was bad, but this season is even worse. “This is not a normal circumstance,” she said.
Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema said 1 million of his country’s 2.2 million hectares of the main maize crop had been destroyed. Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera has requested $200 million in humanitarian aid. Joseph Nleya, Mangwe’s 77-year-old traditional leader, said he could not remember it being so hot, so dry and so desperate.
As this year’s harvest is off, millions of people in Zimbabwe, southern Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar will not be able to feed themselves until 2025. USAID’s Famine Early Warning System estimates that 20 million people will need food aid in southern Africa in the first few months of 2024.
Aid agencies also have limited resources amid the global hunger crisis and reduced humanitarian funding from governments, so many will be left out of aid.
