Madagascar hunger crisis driven by factors other than climate change, scientists say

The crippling drought conditions that have spurred a devastating hunger crisis in Madagascar may not be driven by human-caused climate change, a new analysis has found.

Southern Madagascar — the island nation’s “Grand Sud” region in which 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line — has been confronting a deteriorating food security system, made worse by a lack of precipitation over the past two years, the authors noted. Rebuffing common assumptions, however, the analysis determined that the poor rains largely stemmed from “natural variability.”

Madagascar’s hunger crisis has recently come into the limelight as a cautionary tale of the ramifications of human-induced climate change. Just last month, the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program described the situation as a “wake up call” for what the world “can expect” to see, as The Hill reported.

The World Food Program estimates that 1.3 million people in Madagascar are food insecure and in need of humanitarian assistance, while 28,000 people in the Grand Sud are facing “catastrophe-level” food insecurity.

But scientists at World Weather Attribution — an international initiative led by the Imperial College London and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute — decided to analyze a series of peer-reviewed models and observations that looked at the region’s dearth of precipitation from July 2019 to June 2021.

The rainy seasons of 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 saw just 60 percent of their normal rainfall — estimated to be “a 1-in-135 year dry event,” which was surpassed only by a drought between 1990 and 1992, the analysis found.

Because Madagascar is one of the world’s poorest nations, communities struggle to cope with any period of prolonged drought, particularly when their farming methods rely on rain-fed irrigation only, the authors wrote.

An April 2021 assessment found that more than 43 percent of the population — about 1.14 million people — are confronting food insecurity challenges, the report said.

While the authors of the analysis acknowledged “anomalously high temperatures in the area have almost certainly increased in frequency and intensity due to anthropogenic climate change,” they said a synthesis of rainfall and drought trends for Madagascar as a whole showed that “there were no consistent trends of observed changes in drought over the region.”

“We conclude that even though models show, on average, a small increase of major 2-year droughts like the 2019-2021 one, the trend is not statistically significant compared to natural variability,” the authors wrote.

The analysis also found the coronavirus pandemic to be “an important risk multiplier in the food insecurity crisis,” in which stay-at-home orders and other restrictions limited people’s abilities “to migrate for casual labor.” The pandemic also exacerbated price hikes for food staples, while disruptions to the tourism, mining and textile industries also hurt the local economy.

“This combination of factors underscores the complexity of regional food security in general as well as the difficulty to ‘bounce back’ following failed seasons even if a rainy season is climatologically normal,” the report said.