(Bloomberg) -- The worst floods in decades across a swath of West and Central Africa are deepening a record food-insecurity crisis in a region where the United Nations says 55 million people are already going hungry.
While aid agencies and governments are rushing to feed and shelter millions of displaced people, they’re struggling to meet the scale of the disaster. There are more food insecure people in the conflict-wracked region with some of the world’s poorest countries than the entire population of South Korea.
The heavy rains, which began around June and are forecast to persist, have inundated hundreds of thousands of hectares of freshly planted fields and driven people from their homes in at least 14 nations, stretching from Guinea on Africa’s west coast to the Central African Republic more than 2,000 miles to the east. At least 4 million people have been directly affected and about 1,000 have died.
“We are fearing the worst,” Modou Diaw, regional vice president for the International Rescue Committee in West Africa, said in an interview. “If we talk about numbers we have never seen this before. Definitely it will rise in coming months.”
The IRC says the floods are the worst in the region in 30 years. Researchers blame their severity on climate change and point to record rainfall in some areas. Those affected think the rains are unprecedented, Diaw said.
“When you talk to people in these countries, they say they have never seen anything like it,” he said.
In Mali, 1.35 million hectares of land — an area the size of Austria — has been flooded. In Niger, 400,000 people are on the move and displacement camps in northern Nigeria are filling up, with the town of Maiduguri, where more than a million people live, largely under water after a dam overflowed.
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“The severe flooding in northeast Nigeria in recent days has not only displaced thousands of families but is expected to worsen the already critical crisis of severe acute malnutrition in children,” the IRC said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that it “is preparing for a potential cholera outbreak.”
For aid agencies, attending to the needs of the hungry is proving logistically challenging.
“We still access affected areas by helicopter, but large-scale operations have been made much more difficult by collapsing infrastructure and flooded roads,” said Djaounsede Madjiangar, regional head of communications for West Africa at the United Nations’ World Food Programme.
Islamist insurgencies that plague much of the Sahel, a normally semi-arid region that runs across the continent along the southern border of the Sahara Desert, are complicating the efforts of aid agencies. That, coupled with rampant banditry in northern Nigeria and simmering conflict between farmers and nomadic herders, has already limited where people can grow crops such as corn, millet and sorghum.
Fighting and criminality has quadrupled the number of food-insecure people over the past five years. The floods are even affecting efforts to move aid from eastern Chad into war-torn Sudan.
UN trucks carrying food and other supplies have only been permitted to cross into Sudan’s West Darfur since late August, with 79 taking across provisions for 190,000 people so far. That’s now becoming difficult.
“Trucks carrying food from our hub in Abeche take about ten times longer to reach Adre, where they cross the border into Sudan,” said Sylvain Barral, a spokesman for WFP in Chad. The vehicles get stuck in the mud and have to wait until the riverbeds empty to try and cross, he said.
For now the region’s governments, including those in Cameroon and Mali, are allocating money for immediate relief efforts alongside local companies and even celebrities such as four-time African footballer of the year, Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o. Aid organizations, including the US Agency for International Development, also plan to fund emergency assistance.
“USAID will be announcing additional humanitarian assistance for some of the 4 million people who are in urgent need,” Samantha Power, administrator for the organization, said in an interview.
Longer term, as the crisis worsens, a lot more money will need to be found as its either too late for farmers across the region to replant or the ground is too waterlogged.
“Flooding this year will be a key driver behind higher food prices in addition to insecurity and inflation,” said Ollo Sib, a regional adviser with the WFP. Even before the floods, food prices doubled in countries with high inflation like Nigeria while the cost of cereals in Niger increased significantly with the money needed to buy 70 kilograms (154 pounds) of grain today equivalent to what formerly bought 120 kilograms, he said.
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--With assistance from Matthew Hill, Julia Janicki and Michael Ovaska.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
