Why Madagascar is going hungry

THE PEOPLEUNUNUN of southern Madagascar are in peril. More than 1.1m of them are going hungry, according to the . More than 500,000 children under the age of five are at risk of being acutely malnourished. Many families are eking out their meagre diets with cactus. And the suffering is with the start of the “lean season”, the hungry months before the next harvest.This calamity has several causes. The emphasises climate change. “This is an area of the world that has contributed nothing to climate change, but now, they’re the ones paying the highest price,” said David Beasley, the boss of the ’s World Food Programme, in a television interview. Headlines have called it the world’s first “climate famine”.