Madagascar (country)

South Side of Madagascar from the International Space Station

Madagascar is an island country in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of eastern Africa. It consists of the island of Madagascar, the world's fourth largest island, and many smaller islands. In 2021 its population was estimated at 28,427,328.

Quotes

• Allow me to break down the facts of hunger as they stand right now. 811 million people are chronically hungry. 283 million are in hunger crises — they are marching toward starvation. And within that, 45 million in 43 countries across the globe are in hunger emergencies — in other words, famine is knocking on their door. Places like Afghanistan. Madagascar. Myanmar. Guatemala. Ethiopia. Sudan. South Sudan. Mozambique. Niger. Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Haiti and on and on and on. The world has often experienced famine. But when has it ever been so widespread, in so many places, at the same time? Why? Three reasons. First, man-made conflict. Dozens of civil wars and regional conflicts are raging, and hunger has been weaponized to achieve military and political objectives. Second, climate shocks /climate change. Floods, droughts, locusts and rapidly changing weather patterns have created severe crop failures around the world. Third, COVID-19. The viral pandemic has created a secondary hunger pandemic, which is far worse than the first. Shutdowns destroyed livelihoods. Shutdowns stopped the movement of food. Shutdowns inflated prices. The net result is the poor of the world are priced out of survival. The ripple effect of COVID has been devastating on the global economy. During the pandemic, $3.7 trillion in incomes — mostly among the poor — have been wiped out, while food prices are spiking. The cost of shipping food, for example, has increased 3 – 400%. But in places of conflict and low-income countries, it is even worse. For example, in Aleppo, Syria — a war zone, where I just returned from — food is now seven times more expensive than it was 2 years ago. The combined effect of these three — conflict, climate and COVID — has created an unprecedented perfect storm.
  • David Beasley, Nobel Peace Prize lecture of World Food Programme, 10 December 2021

• The landing of the white man on Madagascar inflicted injury without measure. The consequences of that irruption of Europeans onto Madagascar were not psychological alone, since, as every authority has observed, there are inner relationships between consciousness and the social context.
  • Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), p. 97.

• This country and its people have suffered too much. We are here to give meaning to their lives. We are here to put in place a structure of coordination which will give tangible and measurable results.
  • Hery Rajaonarimampianina, quoted in "Newly elected President of Madagascar commits to overcoming the AIDS epidemic", UNAIDS, 17 April 2014.