NINETEEN
Famine in the south
There have always been famines in Androy, the Land of the Thorns, sometimes called the Land of Thirst. When the rains fail, crops fail. People sell their hoarded cattle and search for edible roots in the forest. They slake the acid pods of tamarind trees with chalk or wood-ash to make famine food that gives bellyache but staves off death. Children die first, then old women, then old men. The able-bodied emigrate to any town with a hope of food. Men may find work, but at least wives and daughters can scrape a pittance as prostitutes. If one is about to die utterly destitute, turn Christian. Christians can be buried without the traditional sacrifice of zebu.4
People have always known it would happen. The list of major famines goes back and back. 1991–92, one of the worst double El Niño years; 1983–84; 1970; a gap in the records I don’t know how to fill in the 1950s and 1960s; 1943–44, again a double El Niño year; 1937; 1930; 1921; 1913; 1911. There have been many El Niño years without famines, but rarely a famine without El Niño. The peak El Niño of 1997 brought low rain, but that was only for a year, so people tided over.5
After each series of bad years, though, the rains return and the people flourish. Tandroy raised in years of plenty were traditionally among the tallest and strongest in Madagascar.
In 1991–92, that changed. The international world noticed there was famine in the south, almost for the first time.6
September 19, 1991. Berenty Reserve.
Photo. 4.30 p.m. The sun dead center, low, like an orange eye. The sweep of the wide flat river bed, with a curve of dark forest on either bank. The bank with Berenty Reserve is rich with birds, lemurs, undergrowth. The far shore is a canopy of trees where zebu graze on packed earth below. In the photo you can’t see the difference: just two dark crescents converging as they curve round a quarter-mile width of sand.
The river bed is dry. It is like a piece of the Sahel a quarter of a mile wide, the Sahara where a river should flow. Its yellow surface is pocked with the hoof prints of zebu led to drink at the one last stagnant puddle in the center; also with the pits where people have dug for their own water.
Walking up the river bed, toward the sun, the silhouettes of two tiny figures: a man and a woman walking. The woman bears a 3-foot pile of their goods on her head.
Oct. 4.
Photo: A group of eight women with buckets and gourds on their heads trudge from the pit in the center of the river their men have dug.
And photo group: The women climb the steep river bank. Our group of camera-hung whites asked if they would mind their pictures taken, for a present. So click the row of eight standing stiff and formal in African picture pose, each with a bucket or gourd on her head, topped with a tuft of green leaves to keep it from sloshing.
Close-up: A girl of perhaps 15, probably with only one or two children so far, smooth chestnut-colored cheeks, hair in elaborately bunched braids behind each ear, a round brown calabash on her head, the same color as the dirt-dun rags she wears as a dress.
Close-up: The end woman, short, almost a dwarf, in a loud pink dress torn on both shoulders and a bright blue water bucket. She grins hugely and strikes a pose, hands on hips and one foot forward. The oldest receives 5,000 francs (about $2.00) to share among all. They seem delighted, and turn to the 5 kilometer trek home.
Oct. 1.
John Davidson, USAID, Economic Attaché ‘We’ve known since April there could be famine in the south. Médicins Sans Frontières gave the alert back then. So we have acted long ago. A shipment of 15,000 tons of rice is due in Tulear harbor in the second week of October.
‘This rice shipment and famine relief is a major, multidonor operation. You should talk to David Fletcher of PAM, the World Food Programme.’
Oct. 9.
David Fletcher, World Food Programme ‘This is a very large project. WFP is coordinating, but there are eight donors in all. USAID is the major one, with its 15,000 tons of rice, but there are Germans, Swiss, UNDP… Whatever you said to the officials at Unicef seems to have fired them up, Alison, and they’re coming in on the transport costs. It isn’t very sexy for Unicef to do transport, but that is what we need.
‘I have hopes of the World Bank coming in, too, but José Bronfmann (the World Bank rep) is not at all convinced. In fact he read me the riot act about food aid skewing local markets. He’d only be reconciled if it were food-for-work. I’m all for food-for-work projects, but the south has been so neglected in development, and the crisis is so imminent that we can’t hold off to identify and set up work schemes unless there are obvious ones to hand. I happen not to share Bank philosophy.
‘I should add that the local markets are skewed anyway. This year 23,000 tons of maize and 9,000 tons of manioc were exported from the port of Tulear. A colleague discovered in February that 1,500 tons of manioc were waiting in Tulear for export to France—for animal feed. We tried to get an EC loan to buy it back for people, but it took so long that the manioc was exported anyway. What we did get was a gift to buy 570 tons of maize in the south for urgent needs, which will help keep the price up.
‘How well do you know Jean de Heaulme?’
Me ‘Very well.’
David ‘What is he like? I have never met him.’
Me ‘Sweet, courteous; no, courtly, devoted to the south… Why?’
David ‘The reason I wanted privacy is that I just learned yesterday there is a problem with the 15,000 tons of rice. You can imagine that that quantity is coming on a very big boat indeed. Well, it’s too big to get into Tulear harbor.
‘We’ve calculated that if we can offload 4,500 tons it will lighten the ship enough to fit past the reef at Tulear. So it seems the first port of call will be Fort Dauphin—this week.’
Me ‘Will it fit in Fort Dauphin?’
David ‘They load the sisal with lighters. They can unload rice the same way, however far out it needs to anchor. But we need real mobilization, and de Heaulme is obviously influential.’
Me ‘OK. If you want my opinion, he is a prince among men. Of course he’s a businessman, and I don’t know what he needs to do to operate in this country. But I do know that he has an extraordinary commitment to the South—people and land. One part of founding their sisal plantation was the de Heaulme family consciousness that they were providing a buffer against famine in the Mandrare Valley. There have always been famines—one particularly terrible one in 1943–44 when the Brits were blockading the ports of Vichy French Madagascar, and no food came to the south. Monsieur de Heaulme told me several times about being out as a boy with his father and seeing something waving from a tree. When they came up, it was a dead woman’s hair. She’d climbed up into the tree to die so her body wouldn’t be eaten by the dogs, which had gone feral from the villages because they were starving, too.
‘The de Heaulmes are really more feudal lords than capitalists, with the better side of feudal obligation to others.’
David. ‘We’re in a real bind. The port warehouses at Fort Dauphin have the last World Food Programme food rotting in them now. I need to jump those warehouses and move this rice quickly—and intact—so you have helped…
‘And just before I go, please give my regards to your husband. He won’t remember me, but we met at the first UNA Conference on Disarmament and Development. He was the main speaker, and I was just out of university. It was his lecture and his advice that really started me on my career in developing countries.’
SOS: Save Our South!
David Fletcher went on national news with a video he took with his own camcorder: skeletal people and blasted crops. A photo appeared on the only newspaper’s front page: a wasted teenager, with the caption ‘Is this Ethiopia? Somalia? No, he is in Madagascar!’ Plateau people dug into their own slim pockets to fund a national organization with an English name: Save Our South, SOS. Malagasy medical students and nurses banded together as ASOS, an NGO for emergency relief. Even a group of Antananarivo street children came to offer a few tiny francs as their contribution. The people of the capital did care, once they knew what the south was suffering.7
Oddly, when the head office of WFP in Rome heard about this, they were horrified. WFP had no authority to raise money within a suffering country, only to accept gifts from donors. This rule has since been changed. But by the time Rome found out what was going on, Fletcher was far ahead of them.
He spoke to the Swiss ambassador. Switzerland promptly sent two logistics experts from the Swiss Disaster Relief Unit, seconded for an entire year. They worked out how the trucks of Fort Dauphin could switch over from carrying sisal to sacks of rice and manioc for distant villages, mostly straight from the port, bypassing the warehouses with their temptation to steal. That helped people to stay at home and preserve their social order, rather than trek to handout centers in the towns.
The crucial link with the villages was an extraordinary team of twelve Malagasy, headed by a medical doctor, Arthuro Razanakolona Randrianiaina. They went to villages ahead of the food trucks to explain what would happen. In those days, international emergency food was typically unloaded by underpaid laborers with no great interest in the outcome— who might not even show up, leaving the cargo stranded. Dr. Arthuro’s team announced that if volunteer village labor did not appear within twenty minutes of a food truck’s arrival, the truck would turn around and leave—rather spectacularly motivating.
Another key to the program was the de Heaulme trucks and drivers. Mobilization needs something to mobilize, and the de Heaulme empire was the only organization capable of responding. Jean de Heaulme takes great pride that over 95 percent of the donated food actually reached its destination. In most famines, aid agencies are proud if half of it is delivered as promised to remote rural areas.
Japanese Aid built a huge underground water cistern by the Mandrare river. The Japanese and Unicef provided cistern trucks to provision thirsty towns and villages. A host of foreign NGOs like Aide Contre la Faim arrived, with earnest European volunteers to run shelters and feeding programs.
Still the crisis deepened. The rains failed for a second year. People began to call it the drought of the century. In 1992 I went with Unicef far from Berenty, to village food distribution, to hospices for mothers with seal-eyed toddlers in every stage of malnutrition, to a village which once owned 500 zebu and now had 20 (prices of cattle on the hoof plummet in famine time, even while prices of any kind of food skyrocket). Most of the time I spent at Berenty Reserve with the Earthwatcher volunteers, eating lobster and roast beef, with cheese omelets for the vegetarians. As economist Amartya Sen brilliantly trumpets to the world, there is always food for those who pay. Famines are not about drought, but about entitlement. Even in Androy people did not die because there was no food available. They died because they could not afford to buy it.8
In 1992 half a dozen doctors and nurses happened to join one Earthwatch team. Earthwatch volunteers came to help with lemur research, unaware of the famine. We all lived in the tourist quarters at Berenty cocooned from the world outside the forest. Then we went to see the hospital of Amboasary. The doctor in charge of the hospital greeted us. He showed us around filthy wards, the glass long since gone from the windows. He picked up a 2-year-old in his arms, unconscious, flaccid as a tiny rag doll. ‘We will save this child,’ said the doctor.
I want to show him to you because he has just been brought in. This is starvation. But even in this condition we can save him, with feeding little by little. What we cannot do is change the surrounding state of the countryside, or the state of Amboasary town. I was trained in France: I have an education like yours. It has taken me two years to realize that my one medical goal in this town is to persuade the people to use latrines. Nothing of the fancy medicine I learned, the medicine I would like to practice. Latrines. If we succeed, we may, we may just, avoid the epidemics that follow famine.
It was that same day that we saw a family walk in totally naked to the soup kitchen run by the Sisters of Charity, who were cooking maize porridge in empty oil drums. Three of the Earthwatch medical people who had never been in a developing country before were too shocked to even speak for the rest of the day. Jim Sellers, another Earthwatcher, seemed strangely confident striding among the temporary huts built of straw in the famine camp. He went away and helped set up an NGO to provide medical volunteers and supplies for Madagascar.9
The overseas famine volunteers congregated in Fort Dauphin every weekend. All week they spooned gruel into dying babies, comforted emaciated mothers, fought the breakdown of recalcitrant food trucks, checked tallies to guard the food from going astray. Many were in culture shock to learn that when village families distributed food, it went first to men, then to women, then to healthy children, not to the smallest or the sickest ones. This is power relations, of course, but, in harsh Darwinian calculus, breeding adults are the most valuable survivors. Rephrased in cultural terms, that means the clan must live. Volunteers who had crossed continents to save suffering children dealt all week long with the knowledge that in some ways the clan’s cattle matter even more. On Saturdays, the aid gang danced all night long at the Panorama Disco of Fort Dauphin to recover…
People who are far from home and under stress can abandon every rule of their own culture. The aid gang swapped partners in a kind of frenzy. Everybody knew everything about everyone else’s affairs, to boot. The Antananarivo plane on Sunday brought in fresh potential mates, and swept others away to the sound of jealous screams and breaking hearts. Not to mention hair-pulling, eye-gouging fights outside the Panorama Disco. Social life in Fort Dauphin has never been so interesting.10
Finally, in October of 1992 the rains returned. People went back to their villages to plant crops, though many needed a gift of hoes even to break the soil—they had sold everything to survive.
The World Food Programme then had an intense internal debate over whether to pull out when the crisis ended. Were they just mandated to do emergency relief, or to take on long-term development? In the teeth of opposition from headquarters and from the Food and Agricultural Organization, Fletcher convinced WFP that Androy is a region which must recover from one famine in order to confront the next one. He saw both a moral and a practical obligation to continue WFP aid as food-for-work projects, chosen from proposals made by villagers themselves for initiatives like local irrigation or cooperatives to market crops. That might encourage an increase in the entire food supply of the region. Again he had to fight distant bureaucrats who tried to mandate that Dr. Arthuro’s team, with all their village contacts, were emergency workers who could not turn to becoming development experts. But the program went ahead. Unicef thought the same; it set about drilling boreholes for water. World Wildlife Fund itself became almost more of a development agency than one for wildlife conservation as it dealt with villages around the great reserve of Andohahela, which straddles the rainfall fault line from rainforest to spiny desert. Other NGOs also settled in for the long haul, particularly Japanese Southern Cross, which replants spiny forest cut for planks and charcoal, and ASOS itself, turning from famine relief to continuing health aid.
A spectacularly successful project began in the Upper Mandrare Basin. IFAD, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, made loans totaling $18 million from 1996 to 2008, with a further $8 million from other agencies. Long and bitter experience has shown that simply throwing money at a problem won’t solve it. However, this scheme was planned with full farmer cooperation, and resident technicians devoted to their outreach task. To begin with, the World Bank rehabilitated the road that connected to the Fort Dauphin road, cutting the 300 km journey from fourteen hours down to six. Then the project tackled irrigation, water users’ associations, improved rice planting, livestock vaccinations and veterinary care—even reforestation with Moringa, a local tree useful for everything from human and cattle food to wood to medicines. Local rice yields soared from 2 to 4.6 tonnes per hectare, and family incomes likewise. Sadly, after the coup of 2009, with the breakdown of law and order and the rise of cattle theft, many gains have been lost—but at least the 100,000 farmers now know how to prosper and that they can do so.11
At the end of the drought and famine of 1991–92, the Androy region was less isolated than ever before—practically a part of the modern world.
But, basically, the south is unsustainable. Spiraling population growth and shrinking resources mean more and more people live from food aid. More drastically, the future prognosis is not more of the same, but worse. Here is ten years later:
June 22, 2002, Berenty.
Moumini Oedraogo, tall, slim, round-faced World Food Programme rep from Burkina Faso, very round dark eyes, close-cropped round skull. He was a beneficiary of the Catholic Relief Services school feeding program as a child when he used to walk 8 km every day to school. Moumini later worked for Catholic Relief Services in Burkina, then for WFP: two years with refugee camps and displaced persons in Goma, general chaos in Kinshasa. Now here, based in Fort Dauphin.
In the famine ten years ago, David Fletcher et al. moved about 19,000 tonnes of food to the south in 1991, and then another 27,000 tonnes in 1992. It took two more years to taper off free food and move to food-for-work, with much soul-searching on WFP’s part about continuing after the immediate emergency. Now the program is 5,000 tonnes per year.
The part Moumini is proudest of is the school feeding program. He had to convince WFP that if they were sending trucks out to give food for work, they could stop at schools on the way. There had been school feeding programs before—started in 1975 for the whole country, then reduced to just Tulear province: the south. However, ‘monetized food’—that is, food sold for money that was supposed to feed back into the program; in other words, money—just disappeared. Also five trucks given to Tulear were carrying anything else but food, while the food rotted in the warehouses. Donors bailed out in January 2001.
Now Moumini has three UN volunteers who take charge and a community monitor in each school so the teachers don’t divert it, and reports each month on the number of boys, girls and cooks fed. Can’t top up teachers’ salary— that’s a government responsibility.
Moumini’s WFP group builds water wells. Traditional pits are narrow cones in the earth about 25 feet deep with a spiral path down the sides. These are built and maintained by the community. Cement versions can be done with WFP food-for-work. The Japanese instead installed hi-tech solar panels powering a pump which carries water to the town of Ambovombe, but much has rusted apart in the three or four years since installation. The basic problem is that there are two water tables: fresh water with salty water below. If you draw off too much fresh, the salty water rises and the system is then useless for people, though zebu may still drink it. (In Androy the zebu matter much more.) The locally built wells at least draw the fresh water very slowly. I saw a natural crack in the rock recently where they sent a teenaged girl down a kind of chimney 8 meters deep. There she could tip a coffee-can on its side to scoop up half a cupful of water at a time.
SAP based in Ambovombe is the Système d’Alerte Précoce, the new early warning system for drought. Observers in each commune fill in forms: one on agricultural output, one on prices in the market and whether there is distress selling of cooking pots, and a third one on social conditions in general. The observers get paid 15,000 FMG ($2.50) per form. The forms are collated and compiled into a preliminary report in April, with a final handsome published report in June. This year suggests bad needs in two communes but others are supposed to be OK.
The catch is that June is too late for most international agencies to respond to a famine due in September– December. Also SAP costs $150,000 per year. Expat salary and computers? Enough to buy an awful lot of food.
The most telling remark of all. Moumini comes from Burkina Faso, and has worked throughout the Sahel, in real desert. There they know how to conserve water: stone dams in fields, trees, storage wells. In southern Madagascar there is far more rain but people don’t do anything about saving it, however much they suffer. In Madagascar he saw for the first time in his life people lying flat on tarmacked roads after rain, lapping at the puddles.
Moumini leaves, admitting that his wife and small baby are arriving today, in two hours, at Fort Dauphin airport, all the way from Burkina Faso, where she had the baby last July. He was there then, but has not seen her since! We said hasty goodbyes.
Eight years later than the last excerpt, eighteen years later than the 1992 famine, 2010 is another bad year. Another diary:
Jan. 18–19, 2010.
High-level Unicef–UNDP tour of Androy. I was shocked at sailing into Tandroy villages in a fleet of three colossal Land Cruisers with aerials for GPS and other communication sticking up to rival the Fantsiolotse spires of the spiny forest. A normal wooden Tandroy house is shorter than one of the Land Cruisers. This is the kind of mission I associate with the World Bank, not Unicef. The look that would make people in Afghanistan set off bombs.
SAP signaled an oncoming crisis in December 2008. In March 2009 Unicef started intervention. Active searching out of acutely malnourished children. Total of 8,713 kids treated in Androy and Anosy. 60 percent cured, 17 percent abandoned program, 2 percent died, about 19 percent did not gain adequate weight, 3 percent transferred. Lack of adequate weight gain likely due to sharing Plumpy’Nut ration among siblings as soon as the target child is out of immediate danger.12
We stop at Maoralopotsy, a tiny village and basic health center south of the main road. It has two new, very young nurses in white coats (med. techs). Cement building with blue doors, two rooms, in wooden village. About thirty women and children squat outside. The med. techs treat diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria. They also follow about 100 pregnancies out of 500 in their area. Only three or four women per month deliver here, the rest with village midwives. Many people live 7–12 km away and in labor would have to travel for two hours over the potholed tracks by ox cart to the CSB. If there are complications they go on by ox cart more hours to the hospital at Ambovombe. Open boxes of birth control records sat on a dusty wooden shelf, so, while the others pored over the CSB nutrition register, Peter Metcalf, (the country’s UNDP rep.) and I picked out a few of the yellow cards. Peter remarked, ‘So much for medical confidentiality.’ Of the 32 records this month, only one woman had as many as eight children. Most of the records were for young teenagers with no or one or two kids, the balance for women in their late thirties at the end of childbearing. This is already a huge change.
The fundamental coping mechanism is the family. Barrenness is the ultimate curse—and not uncommon, given the prevalence of gonorrhea. With a large family, some will support the rest and the aged parents… Besides, leaving descendants is the greatest pride for any Malagasy. Westerners may tuttut, but it is a rational (and joyful) strategy. As my friend Lahivano said when being harangued about birth control, ‘You don’t understand. We like children!’ The family unites to celebrate funerals. Funerals involve feasting and dancing and sex between those cousins distant enough for it not to count as incest. Funeral gatherings and the exchange of brides link ever more extensions of the family. Family is the only sure recourse in the recurrent emergencies.13
The other fallback is the herd. At great funerals, zebu brought by each son-in-law stampede down the village main street while men urge them on with sticks and blank gunfire—round and round through the village to make the herds seem inexhaustible. Of course each owner knows exactly how many he owns, which means that the boasting songs about the number of zebu and the number of grandchildren must be finely judged, because other people know too. In the old days, when there was more forest for pasture and fewer people, a man’s whole herd would be slaughtered at his funeral. Missionaries tut-tutted about this apparent waste of resources. Nowadays most people are nominally Christian, which means only a few of the zebu are killed: enough to feed the scores or hundreds of invitees and to send off the dead ancestor with the nucleus of a herd for his afterlife.14
Depending on livestock, rather than crops, makes sense in a drought-prone area—sheep and goats and zebu live much longer than the shriveled stalks of maize. However, when even livestock die (or, in the modern day, when the market price falls to nothing because everyone is trying to sell), then the destitute still must turn to the extended family.
A final buffer used to be the forest. The commonest famine food is tamarind pulp slaked with chalk to cut its acidity. People tell me that tamarinds will keep you alive for a month or two, but with recurrent bellyache. There are also edible forest roots and tubers. The forest, of course, is adapted to recurrent droughts and still is green when the fields lie burnt and bare. However, there is less and less forest—and the deforestation rate of spiny forest is now some 3.2 percent per year, the highest in Madagascar. The cleared land is turned into fields or charcoal at roughly the same rate as the southern population grows.
Later we will return to the situation after the coup in 2009. Cattle rustling out of the region has skyrocketed: the pride and the family investment in the herds have almost gone.
Bottom line: change is coming, and must come. There is no way the south can return to a pastoralist lifestyle, to mining the spiny forest, to population control through disease, famine, clan war. And yet there is no prospect that agriculture in this dry land will do more than feed local people—in good years. People always, or almost always, find new ways to cope, but how long that will take is shrouded in the heat haze of the future.
4. R. Ramahatra and H. Patterson, Poverty in Madagascar (1993).
5. S. Frère, Panorama de l’Androy (1958).
6. Not quite true: Raymond Decary, the local administrator of Androy, persuaded the colonial government to aid the destitute in the great famine of 1930. However, 1992–92 was the first international response. A. Jolly, Lords and Lemurs: Mad Scientists, Kings with Spears, and the Survival of Diversity in Madagascar (2004).
7. Much of this drought chapter is from converstions with David Fletcher, pers. comm., 2013. ASOS: Aid to Save our South, continuing as Action Socio-sanitaire et Organization Secours. Swiss Disaster Relief Unit: now the Swiss Humanitarian Aid Unit.
8. A. Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981).
9. www.tascmadagascar.org.
10. Helen Crowley, Reserve manager, interview 1999.
11. B. Shapiro, A. Woldeyes et al., Nourishing the Land, Nourishing the People: The Story of One Rural Development Project in the Deep South of Madagascar that Made a Difference (2010).
12. Plumpy’Nut is a kind of peanut butter or Nutella fortified with milk powder, vitamins and minerals. It comes in small plastic packets which keep for two years without refrigeration. A commercial product made by the French Nutriset company. It tastes good!
13. Incest avoidance involves complex calculation by paternal generations. Since a man may have several wives at once or in series, his oldest son may be 40 when his youngest is born, but the sons count as the same generation and their offspring as first cousins. For the role of daughters-in-law, see K. Middleton, ‘The rights and wrongs of loin-washing’ (2000).
14. A. Jolly, Lords and Lemurs: Mad Scientists, Kings with Spears, and the Survival of Diversity in Madagascar (2004).