Due to extreme weather conditions, over 20 million people are facing hunger in southern Africa where the drought has reached a critical level.
Zambia and Malawi have declared the drought a national disaster, and neighboring Zimbabwe, where some 2,7 million people are facing starvation, is close to making such a decision.
The drought affected a wide area from Botswana and Angola in the west to Mozambique and Madagascar in the east of southern Africa.
The drought in those countries has fried the crops that tens of millions of people rely on to survive.
Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema said one million hectares of his country's 2,2 million staple maize crop had been destroyed.
Malawian President Lazarus Chakvera requested 200 million dollars in humanitarian aid.
With a disastrously poor harvest this year, millions of people in Zimbabwe, southern Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar will not be able to feed themselves until next year.
USAID estimates that 20 million people will need food assistance in southern Africa in the first few months of 2024.
Many people will not get help, as aid agencies have limited resources amid a global hunger crisis and dwindling money.
A year ago, much of this region was hit by major tropical storms and severe flooding. The whole region is in a kind of vicious time cycle: first too much rain, then not enough.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) says there are "overlapping crises" of extreme weather in eastern and southern Africa, with both regions caught between "two fires" over the past year - storms and floods followed by heat and drought. UNICEF estimates that about nine million people, half of whom are children, need help in Malawi, which represents almost half of the population there, while the number in Zambia is more than six million, of which three million are children.
In addition to climate change caused by man, the region is also under attack from the El Niño climate phenomenon, which warms parts of the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years, and in southern Africa this means below-average rainfall and drought.
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