UN Reports Acute Food Insecurity in Southern Madagascar

GENEVA - The United Nations says thousands of people in Madagascar are suffering from famine, while more than 1 million others are facing acute hunger and are forced to resort to extreme measures to keep from starving.

More than 1.1 million people in southern Madagascar are unable to feed themselves because the country is suffering from its most acute drought in four decades. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns the humanitarian crisis gripping the country is deteriorating rapidly. OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke says conditions in the Amboasary Atsimo district are particularly serious. About 75% of the population is facing severe hunger, and thousands, he says, are catastrophically food insecure. “We have during this crisis for the first time identified 14,000 people who are in famine condition … Now, children are, of course, especially vulnerable. There is extreme malnutrition, and as we have heard from others, there is no doubt that the level that this has reached now is costing lives among children and others,” Laerke said.