Zimbabwe on the brink of famine due to El Niño

A new UN report reveals that levels of food insecurity in Zimbabwe are worsening due to El Niño droughts.

The United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) called for international support to help him Zimbabwe to address the humanitarian impact of El Niño, which could lead to 7.6 million people going hungry. More than half of the harvest was destroyed due to a historic drought induced by the El Niño phenomenon.

El Niño is a regular and natural meteorological event that influences air temperatures around the sea and coastal landmass of the south-central and eastern Pacific Ocean.The climate crisis of recent years, however, has led to more frequent and intense patterns.

This report comes two months after the agency he entered Zimbabwe on the list of 18 countries at risk of hunger.According to the United Nations, they are needed to support the country in dealing with this crisis at least 429 million dollars, but at the moment the fund was financed by 11 percent.

Drought in Zimbabwe

In the month of April, The President Mnangagwa declares national drought disaster which has been affecting the country for almost two years now.According to Harare, Zimbabwe needs $2 billion to address hunger caused by poor rainfall that wiped out about half of the corn crop.

Grain shortages have pushed up food prices and already in April it was estimated that 2.7 million of people would have faced starvation.Also other countries in the region such as neighbors Zambia And Malawi they recently declared a state of disaster due to the drought, one of the worst in recent decades.There Kapotesa Dam, dried up in the Mudzi district,
exemplifies the dire conditions.

Rural areas are hardest hit

The drought has forced villagers to travel long distances to do odd jobs, earning pittance to buy food.Most families in Mudzi have reduced their meals to two meals a day.THE cases of malnutrition they have increased by 20 percent in recent months, pushing local health experts to create a nutritional porridge called maworesa with locally sourced ingredients to fight the crisis.

Second the latest estimates, 5.9 million people in rural areas and 1.7 million people in urban areas they could find themselves ad face acute hunger during the next lean period.Data provided by the Zimbabwean government shows that 57 percent of people live in rural areas of the country is destined to live in conditions of food insecurity between January and March 2025, a period in which hunger will peak.

The drought has pushed many people to use unsafe water sources, feeding i cholera outbreaks which already afflict several southern African countries, but Harare was harshly criticized for not having been able to effectively tackle the vaccination campaign against the spread of this infectious disease, which mainly affects children, already afflicted by malnutrition.