Maybe it’s just not news anymore because it seems to be happening almost every year and is becoming the ‘norm’, or maybe it doesn’t hit the headlines in Britain because we don’t really care what happens on the other side of the world, I don’t know … But it is heartbreaking to read this:
“My daughter is hungry. We only eat Raketa (Cactus fruit) as we have nothing else,” mother-of-four Zefita told UNICEF after walking 10 kms (6 miles) to the nearest health clinic with her malnourished child.
“If only it was raining, we could cultivate maize or potatoes, but now we cannot do anything,” she said.
These are people who work hard, very hard, to grow enough food for their families. But if there is no rain, no matter how hard they work, they can’t grow anything. I’m not sure what their political leaders, busy with their power struggle, are doing to help… Hard to believe that despite the problems of malnutrition in southern Madagascar, President Ravalomanana, before he was forced from power, had agreed a deal with Daewoo to lease more than a million hectares of Malagasy farm land to produce food for South Korea. Read more here.
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Well I wasn’t aware of southern Madagascar, but in general I’m well aware that increasingly large parts of the world are becoming effectively uninhabitable. As a society, it should be on our conscience. And it should figure in our plans – as well as wondering what to do if parts of East Anglia flood more often, we need to wonder what to do as hundreds of millions of people will be displaced over the coming couple of decades.
Yes, Peter, I agree. Actually when I posted, I had meant to pose the question: to what extent has our behaviour in the West contributed to this dire situation in southern Madagascar, and what are we going to do about it? Then I got distracted thinking about the national political situation.