The famine at the edge of the ocean
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2023
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Madagascar is experiencing its worst famine for over 30 years. With successive years of drought, this began in the country’s deep south but as successive cyclones hit Madagascar in 2022 and 2023, people in the south-east are now also suffering from food insecurity. The United Nations has described this as the “world’s first climate-induced famine”. But some climate scientists claim there is little evidence suggesting global warming is the primary cause. Journalist Raissa Iousouff travels to the south of Madagascar in search of answers and meets many of the local people and communities who are fighting to survive.
Transcript
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| 0:18.3 | You win their art, you win their wallet. |
| 0:20.8 | Followed Jan, every day is a fight to keep her and her family alive. |
| 0:39.4 | I have a disability, I can't work, and I just do weaving, which is how I earn a living. |
| 0:47.9 | I sell it to buy one kind of rice, but it's not enough. |
| 0:53.2 | Lodjan tells me she's 30 years old, but she looks older. |
| 0:58.3 | She's very thin, wearing a bright pink wrapper around her armpits. |
| 1:03.3 | She speaks with a thinly-velled anger. |
| 1:07.5 | I have eight children and no husband, there is nobody to take care of us. |
| 1:16.8 | So I struggle taking care of these children. |
| 1:20.7 | With such a big family to feed, a can of rice only goes so far, and even this is not guaranteed. |
| 1:37.7 | I met Lodjan on a late afternoon in her small village of Tanakombana in Sass eastern Madagascar. |
| 1:44.4 | She had an empty stomach since the night before. |
| 1:48.9 | She is a determined woman, but her body doesn't match her strength of her mind. |
| 1:56.2 | The right side of her lower body is weak, because of the pain she can't do physical labor. |
| 2:05.6 | Her house sits on top of a green hill overlooking a luscious landscape. |
| 2:11.0 | It's isolated from the rest of the village, away from shops, activities, the health |
| 2:16.8 | center and the community. |
| 2:22.4 | My children aren't healthy, they are skinny and tiny, and their belly is big. |
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