In Nigeria, Niger and Chad, violent floods have ravaged agricultural land, risking aggravating the food crisis already present.
Le Monde with AFP
Barefoot in the water, Adamu Garba tries to assess what he can save from his harvest. From his rice fields, there is not much left, destroyed by the violent rains that have been falling for months in northern Nigeria. Thousands of farms, such as that of Mr. Garba, were ravaged this year by the monster floods which hit Western Africa and Central Africa hard.
During harvests, these floods are likely to worsen the food crisis that affects these extremely poor regions, already struggling with the benefits of the war in Ukraine which exploded the price of fertilizers and food products.
In the northern Nigeria alone, the floods – the worst in ten years – have killed more than 300 people and led to the displacement of at least 100,000 people, according to the authorities. “It’s excruciating, but there is nothing we can do, we just have to be strong,” sighs the Nigerian farmer from his plot located on the outskirts of the city of Kano. Normally, his rice fields produce around 200 bags of rice. This season, “I’m not sure I can harvest half a bag”, he said, disappointed.
“Thousands of farms have been destroyed,” said AFP Manzo Ezekiel, the spokesperson for the Nigerian Crisis Management Agency (NEMA). The floods, which affected 29 of the country’s 36 states of 215 million inhabitants, were aggravated by the opening of a dam in Cameroon and two in Nigeria, according to this source.
a large part of Nigeria, from agricultural land from north to the Lagos coastal capital, is subject to floods during the rainy season, which goes from June to August. But according to Nema, this year is the worst recorded since 2012, where 363 people had perished and more than 2.1 million had been moved. “This assessment will get worse while torrential rains and floods continue,” added the spokesperson. In mid-September, the rains had still not stopped.
“increasingly intense rains”
In Niger, a border country, the rains overwhelmed the river with the same name and the floods killed 159 people and affected more than 225,000, according to official figures. This rainy season is thus one of the most devastating that the Sahelian country has ever known.
“According to all our studies, we can link these rains to climate change,” said the director general of national meteorology in Niger, Katiellou Gaptia Lawan. Over the years, “the rains are becoming more and more intense and extreme precipitation is increasing,” added the specialist. These have completely destroyed or damaged more than 25,900 houses, also affecting farms and farms.
In neighboring Chad, the UN estimates that more than 622,500 people have been affected “at different levels” by floods in more than half of the country, including the capital N’Djamena. Before that, the country already faced a serious food crisis and the UN estimates that 5.5 million Chadians, a third of the population of the landlocked country, need urgent humanitarian aid.
This is also the case in northern Nigeria, where more than a million children are threatened by hunger this year, especially because of the conflicts that are rampant there, which distance farmers from their land. The rains only get an already dramatic situation. Not far from Kano, Kabiru Alassan, a 19 -year -old farmer, tries to save his harvest. Its farm was destroyed: the waters won the sand from the roads and covered its rice fields. According to him, the rains have never been so destructive. “We pray for never knowing such a nightmare again,” he said distraught.