MADAGASCAR: Attacked By Drought, In Need Of Food Emergency

Drought-prone southern Madagascar is facing yet another food emergency this year. An unusually strong El Niño season means the rains have failed once more. Prices in local markets have skyrocketed, leaving more than 665,000 people in urgent need of food aid.

This giant Indian Ocean island is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to natural disaster. Madagascar's semi-arid, deep southern regions of Androy, Anosy, and Atsimo Andrefana have faced emergencies year upon year. The recent El Niño has just made an already bad situation worse.

Dami is nearly three years old but weighs only 6.9 kilograms. Underneath his dusty white t-shirt and blue shorts, his limbs are about the size of a carrot but his belly is swollen: a sure sign of malnutrition.

He sucks on a sachet of high-energy Plumpy'Nut, a peanut-based, ready-to-eat food. When he fumbles and drops the packet on the ground, his sister snatches it up and chews at it: she is also hungry.

The current drought, one of the worst seen, has scorched rice and cassava crops, leaving 80 percent of people without a secure food supply. Many agrarian communities are now reliant on food aid - and cacti.

The red fruit of the cacti is an emergency food in the south, but they are hard to digest and can cause bowel problems that exacerbate the effects of malnutrition.

Dami is one of eight children born to 38-year-old Ambahinky Kazy, who is poor and struggles to find work. She wants her children to become teachers, but none of them have been to school.

Dami was given the Plumpy'Nut following a UNICEF screening in Ambondro village, in Androy region. The examination found his mid-upper arm circumference was just 10 centimetres: in the danger zone.

It takes up to 90 sachets of Plumpy'Nut for a child to recover, but this is made difficult as families often regard the "medicine" as food, sharing it out among other hungry siblings.

Kazy has been in and out of the UNICEF programme with her different children over a period of four years, a fact that underlines the region's unrelenting poverty.

Nearly one million children in Madagascar suffer from acute malnutrition, and the island nation has one of the highest rates of under-five stunting in the world.

The malnutrition crisis is the main health issue for the government, according to Health Minister Mamy Lalatiana Andriamanarivo. It "continues to be alarming for us, especially in the south", he said.

While the government says it considers tackling the food crisis a priority, its efforts are stifled by poor funding (much of the health budget is reliant on foreign aid) and implementation issues. It has made little progress in building resilience in communities vulnerable to climatic shocks, and infrastructure is crumbling: more roads are lost than are built each year.