Gaza and Ukraine rightly occupy policy makers everywhere. NATO seeks to buttress Ukraine's defenses against Russian aggression with re-supplies of potent weapons. Washington and its allies, including some of the key Arab states, are trying to broker a sustainable peace plan for Gaza that will retrieve hostages and cease carnage throughout the Strip.
But while diplomats and strategists, and the UN's leadership is focused smartly on those two existential calamities, the world's worst twenty-first century civil war is killing 150,000 Sudanese and displacing 10 million more, especially in an ethnic-cleansed province like Darfur. It is also a huge humanitarian emergency with at least 18 million people at imminent risk of starvation. Yet because of Gaza and Ukraine, the imploding of Sudan is largely being ignored. Only relief agencies are paying it proper attention.
The same limited attention is being paid, alas, to one of the world's other major unfolding natural disasters, the impending starvation of millions in the southern African nations of Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Rainfall suddenly ceased in February, probably thanks to El Nino's impact on the southern oscillation that normally draws rain into the region from the Atlantic Ocean. Rising temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean (El Nino's effect) influence -- in this case adversely -- the recurring climate pattern that usually produces rain to fall on germinating crops across much of Africa south of the Equator.
Once the rains stopped this year and crops could not grow, harvests (now mostly concluded across the region) produced only stunted maize, wheat, cowpeas, pigeon peas, and everything else that depends on water from rain. (The region has very little irrigation.) Only cassava (manioc) survived -- somewhat.
The resulting food shortages in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi are now worrying relief agencies and official international bodies like the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the World Food Program, and UNICEF. Famine is the expected outcome for half of all Zimbabweans and similar proportions of people in the neighboring countries. The UN says that 18 million persons in all three countries, plus Botswana and parts of Mozambique, need urgent assistance. The region (with a total population in all five countries of about 68 million) is experiencing its worst dry spell in more than a century.
Malawians are reported to have started eating grass seed to survive and a group of villagers there were hospitalized after eating poisonous tubers.
In countries like Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi many millions survive primarily on sub subsistence crops that they grow themselves. Intensifying climate change is thus exacerbating existing hunger and poverty. It stops raining by June and usually does not resume raining until November or December. Hence, the cold months that are now a fact in southern Africa also coincide with (this year) a very bad harvest. An estimated 60 percent of all crops have failed.
About 5 million tons of maize are required to stem this season’s famine, but the World Food Program and other emergency suppliers are short of food and cash. Moreover, appeals for aid to this distant part of the world must compete with appeals for Sudan, for Gaza, for Ukraine, and for the Congo (about which I will write soon).
Moreover, as the white maize that most Central and Southern Africans consume daily as their staple source of food dies on their own plots, it also becomes impossibly expensive in the market. In addition to crops failing, numerous livestock have died. Food prices have risen 82 percent in the hardest hit areas. Even before this climate-induced crisis, the World Food Program was feeding 40 percent of Zimbabweans, largely with maize from North America. Now it and everyone else must scrounge.
The invasion of Ukraine adds to the food calamity in Africa. Wheat from both Russia and Ukraine has become more costly, thanks to the war, as has cooking oil from Ukraine and whatever maize Ukraine has managed to export.
The situation in Zimbabwe is particularly harrowing because, unlike its neighbors, the autocratic rulers of the country long ago abandoned concern for the bulk of their people. More interested in profitable returns from gold, lithium, cobalt, and ferrochrome, President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his associates show little interest in the plight of those 6 million Zimbabweans that OCHA says are about to suffer serious food shortages leading, in some cases, to starvation. Zimbabwe is rampantly corrupt, too, and the leaders of the government are focused more on what they can personally purloin more than on how best to subsidize maize imports for the poor.
OCHA reports that drought already imperils potable water as well as food availability. It estimates that 2.6 million Zimbabweans will have trouble obtaining clean water; already 46 percent of Zimbabweans lack access to basic waterborne sanitation systems. A cholera outbreak, begun last year, is still needlessly killing rural Zimbabweans. Fifty districts are affected. In early April, there were 31,000 cases and 591 deaths.
Drinkable water scarcity, joined by hunger or food insecurity, also puts the vulnerable young and old, and nursing mothers, at risk, especially in the very hot southern African months of October and November. Even citizens in Harare, the capital city, can no longer rely on adequate water supplies from their municipal system. Because of corruption and mismanagement, Harare long ago let its municipal water facilities deteriorate; at one point several years ago the city ran out of cash to pay for chlorine. Homeowners dug artesian wells as quickly as they could.
Drought has also slowed the flow of the mighty Zambezi River, causing serious shortages of electric power from the lofty Kariba Dam that straddles it. The Zimbabwean government also lacks the ready cash with which to replace lost Kariba electricity with power from outside its borders.
Power blackouts, difficulties in accessing water, and hunger all contribute to educational declines. OCHA indicates that an estimated 1.24 million Zimbabwean students will be negatively affected by the drought, dropping out of school to find food and water. In earlier El Nino accelerated regional rainfall failures, 3 percent more pupils left classes permanently than in normal years.
An immediate answer to the subsistence crisis in southern Africa is World Food Program assistance to prevent acute hunger. Long term, the governments of the region should help their villagers build small scale water-retention barrages and (as they did decades ago) set aside surpluses in times of plenty to prepare for the food emergencies that are bound -- given the heating up of the atmosphere -- to recur frequently.
Shortages of food, the absence of jobs, and the wars of sub-Saharan Africa all drive its younger men to migrate, usually northward or westward. If Europe and the U. S. want to reduce migratory flows as well as to help Africa help itself, building agricultural and water resiliency would be a key place to begin. As the planet continues to warm, inexorably, there will be both less and more rain, and many unanticipated deviations from the norm. Let us prepare!