The Documentary Podcast · BBC World Service

Madagascar: From famine to hope

·26 min·1 clip

Madagascar has 1.9 million people in acute food insecurity and nearly 40% of children under five are chronically malnourished.

1. The Documentary Podcast episode “Madagascar: From Famine to Hope” follows Georgie Stiles across Madagascar’s farms and drought-hit south. 2. Georgie Stiles is the presenter and food anthropologist, and her field reporting links women’s land rights to climate resilience. 3. The episode asks whether women-led farming and agroecology can help Madagascar adapt to longer droughts and more frequent cyclones. 4. Stiles describes the island as the fourth largest in the world, once called the “Green Island,” now exposed as the “Red Island.” 5. The episode says 1.9 million people are in acute food insecurity and nearly 40% of children under five are chronically malnourished. 6. A women’s collective near Antananarivo grows cassava, peas, green beans, bees, fish, poultry, zebu, and seeds on shared land. 7. Laluna says the commune has 60 women in the farm group and 150 members in the wider commune. 8. She says saving money helps the women rent more land and make decisions without consulting their husbands. 9. Lilia Ravanarasoa, founder of Femmes in Action Rural de Madagascar, explains that women often cannot inherit land and may lose access after marriage or widowhood. 10. She says Madagascar’s 2005 land reform gives men and women equal legal rights to buy land, but customary law still favors men. 11. Lilia describes her own family conflict, saying her in-laws criticized her because her husband stayed home raising the children and doing household work. 12. She says that fight lasted years, but her yields and land ownership eventually made her a family role model. 13. Women in the collective were sometimes beaten by husbands for attending training, yet some husbands later encouraged them after seeing results. 14. Femmes in Action Rural now has more than 10,000 female members across Madagascar and teaches agroecology as a climate-resilient farming system. 15. Laluna says agroecology improved the quantity and quality of her products and increased her income. 16. Huli Raubina of the Food and Agriculture Organization says secure land rights help women invest in food, nutrition, maternal health, and children’s education. 17. The tone is observational and report-led, with field scenes, direct interviews, and narrated data points from Save the Children and the European Commission. 18. The structure moves from the central highlands to the drought-stricken south, using farm visits, family testimony, and expert explanation. 19. Listeners interested in climate adaptation, women farmers, and food security will get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting a light or purely entertainment-focused episode may skip it.

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