The incoming U.S. president, Donald
Trump, has denied manmade climate change. The Times’s Nicholas Kristof
travels to drought-stricken Madagascar to see the unfolding crisis for
himself.
TSIHOMBE,
Madagascar — She is just a frightened mom, worrying if her son will
survive, and certainly not fretting about American politics — for she
has never heard of either President Obama or Donald Trump.
What
about America itself? Ranomasy, who lives in an isolated village on
this island of Madagascar off southern Africa, shakes her head. It
doesn’t ring any bells.
Yet
we Americans may be inadvertently killing her infant son. Climate
change, disproportionately caused by carbon emissions from America,
seems to be behind a severe drought that has led crops to wilt across
seven countries in southern Africa. The result is acute malnutrition for
1.3 million children in the region, the United Nations says.
Trump
has repeatedly mocked climate change, once even calling it a hoax
fabricated by China. But climate change here is as tangible as its
victims. Trump should come and feel these children’s ribs and watch them
struggle for life. It’s true that the links between our carbon
emissions and any particular drought are convoluted, but over all,
climate change is as palpable as a wizened, glassy-eyed child dying of
starvation. Like Ranomasy’s 18-month-old son, Tsapasoa.
Southern
Africa’s drought and food crisis have gone largely unnoticed around the
world. The situation has been particularly severe in Madagascar, a
lovely island nation known for deserted sandy beaches and playful
long-tailed primates called lemurs.
But the southern part of the island doesn’t look anything like the
animated movie “Madagascar”: Families are slowly starving because rains
and crops have failed for the last few years. They are reduced to eating
cactus and even rocks or ashes. The United Nations estimates that
nearly one million people in Madagascar alone need emergency food
assistance.
 |
| Ranomasy walked 12 hours to get her 18-month-old son, Tsapasoa, to an emergency feeding station.
Credit
Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times |
I
met Ranomasy at an emergency feeding station run by Catholic nuns who
were trying to save her baby. Ranomasy had carried Tsapasoa 12 hours on a
trek through the desert to get to the nuns, walking barefoot because
most villagers have already sold everything from shoes to spoons to
survive.
“I feel so powerless as a mother, because I know how much I love my child,” she said. “But whatever I do just doesn’t work.”
The drought is also severe in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and a
related drought
has devastated East Africa and the Horn of Africa and is expected to
continue this year. The U.N. World Food Program has urgently appealed
for assistance, but only half the money needed has been donated.
The
immediate cause of the droughts was an extremely warm El Niño event,
which came on top of a larger drying trend in the last few decades in
parts of Africa.
New research, just
published
in the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, concludes that
human-caused climate change exacerbated El Niño’s intensity and
significantly reduced rainfall in parts of Ethiopia and southern Africa.
The
researchers calculated that human contributions to global warming
reduced water runoff in southern Africa by 48 percent and concluded that
these human contributions “have contributed to substantial food
crises.”
 |
| Many rivers and wells have dried up in southern Madagascar, forcing people to buy water that is trucked in.
Credit
Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times |
As
an American, I’m proud to see U.S. assistance saving lives here. If it
weren’t for U.S.A.I.D., the American aid agency, and nonprofit groups
like Catholic Relief Services that work in these villages, far more
cadavers would be piling up. But my pride is mixed with guilt: The
United States single-handedly accounts for more than one-quarter of the
world’s carbon dioxide emissions over the last 150 years, more than
twice as much as any other country.
The
basic injustice is that we rich countries produced the carbon that is
devastating impoverished people from Madagascar to Bangladesh. In
America, climate change costs families beach homes; in poor countries,
parents lose their children.
In
one Madagascar hamlet I visited, villagers used to get water from a
well a three-hour walk away, but then it went dry. Now they hike the
three hours and then buy water from a man who trucks it in. But they
have almost no money. Not one of the children in the village has ever
had a bath.
Families
in this region traditionally raised cattle, but many have sold their
herds to buy food to survive. Selling pressure has sent the price of a
cow tumbling from $300 to less than $100.
Families
are also pulling their children out of school, to send them foraging
for edible plants. In one village I visited, fewer than 15 percent of
the children are attending primary school this year.
One
of the children who dropped out is Fombasoa, who should be in the third
grade but now spends her days scouring the desert for a wild red cactus
fruit. Fombasoa’s family is also ready to marry her off, even though
she is just 10, because then her husband would be responsible for
feeding her.
“If
I can find her a husband, I would marry her,” said her father, Sonjona,
who, like many villagers, has just one name. “But these days there is
no man who wants her” — because no one can afford the bride price of
about $32.
 |
|
Fombasoa, 10, at left. Her father would like to marry her off, because then her husband would be responsible for feeding her. Credit Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times |
Sonjona
realizes that it is wrong to marry off a 10-year-old, but he also knows
it is wrong to see his daughter starve. “I feel despair,” he said. “I
don’t feel a man any more. I used to have muscles; now I have only
bones. I feel guilty, because my job was to care for my children, and
now they have only red cactus fruit.”
Other
families showed me how they pick rocks of chalk from the ground, break
them into dust and cook the dust into soup. “It fills our stomachs at
least,” explained Limbiaza, a 20-year-old woman in one remote village.
As it becomes more difficult to find the chalk rocks, some families make
soup from ashes from old cooking fires.
Scientists
used to think that the horror of starvation was principally the dying
children. Now they understand there is a far broader toll: When children
in utero and in the first few years of life are malnourished, their
brains don’t develop properly. As a result, they may suffer permanently
impaired brain function.
“If
children are stunted and do not receive the nutrition and attention in
these first 1,000 days, it is very difficult to catch back up,” noted
Joshua Poole, the Madagascar director of Catholic Relief Services.
“Nutritional neglect during this critical period prevents children from
reaching their full mental potential.”
For
the next half century or so, we will see students learning less in
school and economies held back, because in 2017 we allowed more than a
million kids to be malnourished just here in southern Africa, collateral
damage from our carbon-intensive way of life.
The
struggling people of Madagascar are caught between their own corrupt,
ineffective government, which denies the scale of the crisis, and
overseas governments that don’t want to curb carbon emissions.
Whatever
we do to limit the growth of carbon, climate problems will worsen for
decades to come. Those of us in the rich world who have emitted most of
the carbon bear a special responsibility to help people like these
Madagascar villagers who are simultaneously least responsible for
climate change and most vulnerable to it.
The challenges are not hopeless, and I saw programs here that worked. The World Food Program
runs school feeding programs
that use local volunteers and, at a cost of 25 cents per child per day,
give children a free daily meal that staves off starvation and creates
an incentive to keep children in school.
We
need these emergency relief efforts — and constant vigilance to
intervene early to avert famines — but we can also do far more to help
local people help themselves.
Catholic
Relief Services provides emergency food aid, but it also promotes
drought-resistant seed varieties and is showing farmers near the coast
how to fish. It is also working with American scientists on new
technologies to supply water in Madagascar, using condensation or
small-scale desalination.
American
technology helped create the problem, and it would be nice to see
American technology used more aggressively to mitigate the burden on the
victims.
For
me, the most wrenching sight of this trip was of two starving boys near
the southern tip of Madagascar. Their parents are climate refugees who
fled their village to try to find a way to survive, leaving the boys in
the care of an aunt, even though she doesn’t have enough food for her
own two daughters.
I
met the boys, Fokondraza, 5, and Voriavy, 3, in the evening, and they
said that so far that day they hadn’t eaten or drunk anything (the
closest well, producing somewhat salty water, is several hours away by
foot, and fetching a pail of water becomes more burdensome when everyone
is malnourished and anemic). Their aunt, Fideline, began to prepare the
day’s meal.
 |
|
Voriavy, left, and Fokondraza stood behind their aunt, Fideline, as she prepared cactus pads for their day’s meal.
Credit
Ben C. Solomon/The New York Times |
She
broke off cactus pads, scraped off the thorns and boiled them briefly,
and the boys ate them — even though they provide little nutrition. “My
heart is breaking because I have nothing to give them,” Fideline said.
“I have no choice.”
At
night, the boys sometimes cry from hunger, she said. But that is a good
sign. When a person is near starvation, the body shuts down emotion,
becoming zombielike as every calorie goes to keeping the heart and lungs
working. It is the children who don’t cry, those quiet and
expressionless, who are at greatest risk — and the two boys are becoming
more like that.
I
don’t pretend that the links between climate change and this food
crisis are simple, or that the solutions are straightforward. I flew
halfway around the world and then drove for two days to get to these
villages, pumping out carbon the whole way.
Yet
we do know what will help in the long run: sticking with the Paris
agreement to limit global warming, as well as with President Obama’s
Clean Power Plan. We must also put a price on carbon and invest much
more heavily in research on renewable energy.
In
the short and medium term, we must step up assistance to climate
refugees and sufferers, both to provide relief and to assist with new
livelihoods that adjust to new climate realities. (For individuals who
want to help, the organization most active in the areas I visited was
Catholic Relief Services, which accepts
donations for southern Madagascar.)
The
most basic starting point is for the American president-elect to
acknowledge what even illiterate Madagascar villagers understand:
Climate change is real.
As
the sun set, I told Fideline that there was a powerful man named Trump
half a world away, in a country she had never heard of, who just might
be able to have some impact, over many years, on the climate here. I
asked her what she would tell him.
“I
would ask him to do what he can, so that once more I can grow cassava,
corn, black-eyed peas and sorghum,” she said. “We’re desperate.”
Mr. President-elect, are you listening?
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