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From Our Own Correspondent: Madagascar: the threat of starvation

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11/12/2021 GMT

Madagascar: the threat of starvation

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Madagascar: the threat of starvation

The roots of a famine now menacing Madagascar; stories from Honduras, Poland and Ireland

The long-term roots of famine now threatening many villages in southern Madagascar; a new President in Honduras; the discontents of Poland's border force and returnees in Ireland

Pascale Harter introduces insight and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and writers from around the world.

The UN and its agencies have said that more than a million people in southern Madagascar are now at risk of serious food insecurity. As famine threatens, and the rains fail to break a serious drought, Catherine Byaruhanga walked the encroaching sand dunes in Ambovombe-Amboy district to hear from villagers about the desperate straits they're now in.

Hondurans recently voted in their first-ever female President - Xiomara Castro, a former First Lady of the country who returns to the national stage after years of rule by the National Party. The outgoing President, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was seriously compromised by his brother's conviction in a New York court for big-league drug smuggling, and on the streets of Tegucigalpa, Will Grant found plenty of people bidding a happy goodbye to an era of sleaze.

The recent state of stand-off at the border between Poland and Belarus, with groups of hundreds of migrants and refugees sheltering in the forests trying to cross into the EU as border guards tried to stop them, has sparked horrified reactions around the world. But what did this dispute do to the men who were charged with policing the border, and driving back desperate people? In Bialystock, eastern Poland, Lucy Ash investigated reports that some are struggling to deal with the mental burden of the job. 

And in the west of Ireland, there's been quite a surge of returners recently: Irish citizens who've spent years working, studying and living abroad but now feeling the pull of their home communities. In his local pub, Kieran Cooke joined the conversation and heard stories from all over the world.

(Image: A child is checked for malnutrition at a Medecins Sans Frontières clinic in Madagascar, April 2021. Credit: MSF/ iAko M. Randrianarivelo/Mira Photo)

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