Floods in Africa affect 4 million people, deepen food crisis

Flooding in 14 nations in central and west Africa has affected at least 4 million people – leaving many homeless – killed around 1,000 and devastated crops in a region already short of food and plagued by insecurity.

Heavy rains in the western half of the semi-arid Sahel, which borders the southern Sahara Desert from the west coast to east Africa, are likely to persist, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. Researchers blame global warming for this year’s deluge – which coincides with a crucial harvest season – saying rising temperatures result in the air storing more water vapour.

Much of the Sahara will receive more than 500 percent of normal rainfall in September, according to Severe Weather Europe, a blog that publishes weather forecasts. The International Rescue Group described the flooding in the region as the worst in 30 years, and estimates from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Center for Climate Risks show that large areas of Mali received the heaviest rainfall on record in the first 10 days of September. Parts of Niger and Chad did as well.

“The dramatic flooding we are currently seeing in West Africa coincides with the monsoon season,” said Benjamin Sultan, a researcher at the French government’s Institute for Sustainable Development Research, who works on climate change with a focus on West Africa. “It’s getting more intense every year, causing deadly floods like we’re seeing in the Sahel.”

The floods are hitting a region that is among the least prepared globally for climate-related disasters, with little money available to protect infrastructure against bad weather. Chad ranks last in an index of 187 countries assessed by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative for vulnerability to climate change, and flood-affected countries rank in the bottom 10.

Hunger record

In Chad, flooding has engulfed almost the entire country, leaving at least 340 dead and 1.5 million people homeless, according to the government. They destroyed approximately 160,000 homes, submerged 260,000 hectares (642,470 acres) of land and drowned 60,000 livestock.

“With farmland flooded and livestock drowned, there will be much less food available now and in the future in a country where 3.4 million people are already facing acute hunger – the highest level of food insecurity ever recorded in Chad,” Jens Laerke, a United A spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told a briefing last week.

Neighboring Niger is also badly affected – with 400,000 people homeless and 273 killed – while Mali has recorded 62 deaths and 345,000 people are homeless, according to governments and aid groups working in the two nations. Food prices are rising in Niger as transport routes to markets become impassable.

“I have never seen rain like this,” said Mamadou Tidiani, a farmer with seven children in Niger’s Agadez region. “It’s too early to say how much of the crop has been destroyed, but I’m afraid it will be bad.”

Nor was northern Nigeria spared from the floods, caused in part by the bursting of a dam near the city of Maiduguri, which displaced more than 610,000 people and killed 201, according to the World Health Organization. Half of the city of more than one million people is under water, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.

Across the region, 55 million people are considered food insecure, a fourfold increase from five years ago, WFP said in a statement.

“Hunger looms large,” said the organization, which runs emergency kitchens in Maiduguri and provides emergency food in Chad, Liberia, Mali and Niger.

Tahir Hamid Nguilin, Chad’s finance minister and chairman of the flood prevention committee, said the situation was unprecedented, especially in the northern part of the country, which is largely desert. The floods affected the production of millet, maize, sorghum and rice.

Further south in Cameroon, 11 people died and nearly 200,000 were displaced by floods, which also destroyed 103,000 hectares of farmland, according to the government. The government is moving people to safer areas and arranging for students to continue studying after 198 schools were flooded and a major bridge was damaged. Some cocoa plantations have been flooded and roads from farms to markets are unusable.

“This year is exceptional. I haven’t seen floods like this since I was a kid. We think it’s climate change,” said Mahamane Hamza, a 62-year-old agronomist from the Tahoua region of western Niger. “It destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of farmland.”

The wet weather in West Africa coincides with torrential rains in European countries, including Poland, Austria and Germany, which have killed at least 18 people.

Copyright 2024 Bloomberg.

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