Africa Floods Affect 4 Million People, Deepen Food Crisis

(Bloomberg) — Floods across 14 central and West African nations have affected at least 4 million people — rendering many of them homeless — killed about 1,000 and are devastating crops in a region that’s already short of food and plagued by insecurity.

The heavy rains in the western half of the semi-arid Sahel zone, which borders the southern Sahara Desert from Africa’s west to east coasts, are likely to persist, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. Researchers blame this year’s deluge — which coincides with a crucial crop season — on global warming, saying that rising temperatures are resulting in the air storing more water vapor.

A large part of the Sahara will get more than 500% of its normal September rainfall, according to Severe Weather Europe, a blog that publishes meteorological forecasts. The International Rescue Group described the floods across the region as the worst in 30 years and estimates from University of California, Santa Barbara’s Climate Hazards Center show large stretches of Mali received the highest rainfall on record for the first 10 days of September. Parts of Niger and Chad did too. 

“The dramatic flooding that we’re currently seeing in West Africa coincides with the monsoon season,” said Benjamin Sultan, a researcher at the French government’s Research Institute for Sustainable Development who’s working on climate change with a focus on West Africa. “It’s becoming more and more intense every year, causing deadly floods as we’re seeing in the Sahel.”

The floods are hitting a region that’s among the least-prepared globally for climate-related disasters, with little money available to buffer infrastructure against adverse weather. Chad ranks last in an index of 187 countries assessed by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative for climate-change vulnerability and of the countries affected by the floods five rank in the bottom 10.

Record Hunger

In Chad, the floods have swept across almost the entire country, resulting in at least 340 deaths and rendering 1.5 million homeless, according to the government. They’ve destroyed about 160,000 dwellings, submerged 260,000 hectares (642,470 acres) of land and drowned 60,000 livestock. 

“With flooded farmland and drowned livestock, there will be a lot less food available now and in the future in a country where 3.4 million people already face acute hunger – the highest level of food insecurity ever recorded in Chad,” Jens Laerke, a United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokesman, said in a briefing last week.

Neighboring Niger is also hard-hit — with 400,000 made homeless and 273 killed — while Mali has recorded 62 deaths and 345,000 people are without shelter, according to the governments and aid groups working in the two nations. Food prices are rising in Niger as transport routes to markets become impassable.

“I’ve never seen rains like this,” said Mamadou Tidiani, a farmer with seven children in Niger’s Agadez region. “It’s too soon to say how much of the harvest that was destroyed, but I fear it will be bad.”

Northern Nigeria also hasn’t been spared from floods, partly caused by a dam bursting near the town of Maiduguri, displacing more than 610,000 and killing 201, according to the World Health Organization. Half of the city of more than a million people is under water, according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme.

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Across the region 55 million people are deemed food insecure, a fourfold increase from five years ago, the WFP said in a statement.

“Hunger looms large,” said the organization, which is running emergency kitchens in Maiduguri and providing emergency food in Chad, Liberia, Mali and Niger.

Tahir Hamid Nguilin, Chad’s finance minister and chairman of the flooding prevention committee, has said the situation is unprecedented, especially in the northern part of the country, which is largely desert. The floods have affected production of millet, corn, sorghum and rice. 

Further south, in Cameroon, 11 people have died and close to 200,000 have been displaced by the floods, which have also destroyed 103,000 hectares of farmland, according to the government. The government is relocating people to safer areas and arranging for students to continue studying after 198 schools were inundated and a major bridge damaged. Some cocoa plantations have been flooded and roads from farms to markets aren’t usable.

“This year is exceptional. Since I was a child I haven’t seen flooding like this. We believe it’s climate change,” said Mahamane Hamza, a 62-year-old agronomist in Niger’s western Tahoua region. “It’s destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of farmland.”

The wet weather in western Africa coincides with torrential rains in European nations including Poland, Austria and Germany that have left at least 18 people dead.

–With assistance from Emele Onu, Paul Richardson, Ana Monteiro, Moses Mozart Dzawu and Diakaridia Dembele.

(Updates with extent of floods in first paragraph.)

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