DANCING CARTOON lemurs, majestic baobab trees and lush documentaries about the extraordinary biodiversity of Madagascar have much to answer for. They have created an image of the world’s fourth-largest island that is jarringly at odds with reality: Madagascar is one of the poorest countries on Earth. Because it has banned foreign journalists (along with most other foreigners, in an attempt to slow the spread of covid-19), few in the outside world are aware of the famine that has left more than a million people hungry in the south of the Island. Your correspondent evaded the ban.

This is the story of the 110km journey from Fort Dauphin to Ambovombe along the grandly named Route Nationale 13, or RN13. It might as well be dubbed the road of tears.

Fort Dauphin was named in 1643 after the heir to the French throne, the boy who would become Louis XIV, the Sun King. Tolagnaro is its Malagasy name but few seem to use it. From 1825 it was a garrison town for the Imerina troops from Madagascar’s highlands who conquered and subjugated most of the island to create a pre-colonial proto-state. Later, after the French conquest in the late 19th century, it flourished. Now it is utterly isolated. There are no paved roads to get here and very few flights. Some goods come by ship. Some jobs have been created here by a mining company majority-owned by Rio Tinto, an Anglo-Australian firm. The company paid for roads in town but they soon peter out. Even the pre-electronic flight-announcement board in the airport hints at what is to come as soon as you leave town. There has been almost no development in this region for decades.

Leave Fort Dauphin early in the morning, and the road is packed with people coming into town. Men carry four or five sacks of charcoal perched precariously on the backs of their bikes. Only some 15% of Malagasy have electricity, so charcoal is the main source of fuel for cooking. But chopping down trees for charcoal has devastated Madagascar, resulting in soil erosion, sandstorms and habitat destruction for much of the country’s unique flora and fauna. In 1960 Madagascar had 5m people. Now it has 27m. This population explosion and the subsequent hunger for land has also driven the destruction of its once extensive rainforests.

After the outskirts of Fort Dauphin the road is just a cratered track, muddy after rain and later just dusty. Because there are so few paved roads on the island, it takes between two and three days to drive to Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. Fort Dauphin’s port is mainly used only to export from its mine and little else. Poor infrastructure means that there is hardly any trade within the south or between the south and the rest of the country. As a result, anything not produced locally is much more expensive than other more accessible parts of Madagascar. Still, this part of the south is relatively well off—it has been raining. Here villagers toil in the fields and the rice-paddies. Rice is the staple food of Madagascar, a nod to the fact that the ancestors of many Malagasy hail not from Africa but from what is now Indonesia. Living on an island that was long relatively isolated from the continent, Malagasy don’t really consider themselves African.

Twenty-one kilometres west of Fort Dauphin is the little market town of Manambaro. The name means “has a lot of varo”, which is a type of tree, but it does not have a lot any more. Most were chopped down and reduced to charcoal years ago. Even so, the market stalls are groaning with food. As Brigitte scoops out rice in small tins to sell to her customers, she explains that some is Malagasy and some is imported. “Pakistani rice is not as good quality,” she says: “It does not taste as good.” It also might be old, she says. Food there may be, but covid-19 and drought in southern Madagascar have hit the economy hard. Even as people’s incomes have fallen, the price of rice has increased over the past year by 17-30%, depending on the type.

Past Manambaro the road climbs through the mountains. They act as a natural barrier. To the east it rains as the clouds blowing in from the Indian Ocean bump up against the peaks. But to the west it is drier. Descending on the other side, the road passes through a forest of spiny cactus. In the 1920s the French introduced cochineal beetles here to clear land for farming. The result was devastating. Within a few years bugs had utterly destroyed the cactus that the zebu, or native hump-backed cattle, grazed on. This caused the famine of 1930, during which some 10,000 zebu and up to a thousand pastoralists died. Today, with an eye on COP26, the upcoming UN climate-change conference, some officials within the UN are arguing that the drought in the south is the first to be caused by climate change. In fact the region has been afflicted by keré, which means both “drought” and “hunger” for more than a century. The first recorded drought-driven famine was in 1895, followed by dozens since then. In the past they lasted a few months or a season; now they go on for several years.

In Amboasary Sud the RN13 crosses the Mandrare river. It is much lower than it should be at this time of year. The banks are thronged by women washing clothes and themselves. They complain that villagers from out of town are bringing their zebu, which makes the water dirty. Zebu-drawn carts are coming, too, to collect water to sell in parched villages. The hunt for water in this region is a major preoccupation. Getting it takes either time or money.

Climate change has made the droughts worse. So has tree-chopping. Here the colonial French indulged on a grand scale when they were in charge. Just on the other side of the bridge in Amboasary Sud are the beginnings of sisal plantations, which cover thousands of hectares and stretch as far as the eye can see. Sisal is a drought-resistant plant used for making rope, among other products, and these plantations are the result of the French clearing the forest here beginning in the 1930s.

This part of Madagascar is famous for its funerary customs. To honour the dead, zebu must be killed and grand celebrations held in honour of the departed. Huge sums are invested in tombs. The numbers of zebu skulls displayed by the tombs attest to the wealth and social importance of the dead. Honouring ancestors is a big part of local culture. But the prohibitive cost of these ceremonies makes it hard for families to save and invest in their children’s education, their homes, their farms and their futures.

Approaching Ambovombe, the capital of the Androy region, the situation begins to look bleak. A few miles south of the RN13 is the village of Maroalopoty, which has had hardly any rain for several years. In the village clinic, Zemele has brought her grandchild Masy for help. She looks like a plump baby, but that is misleading: she is actually almost four years old and suffering from acute malnutrition. According to Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, 47% of all Malagasy children suffer from stunting caused by malnutrition, a figure that is higher in the south. There are ten people who live in Zemele’s household. Masy’s parents have gone elsewhere to look for work and, in desperation, Zemele has sold three of her four fields.

There is a well in Maroalopoty but it has to supply hundreds of people, and because of the drought the water table is constantly dropping. Several kilometres away, near the beach, there is another well. Here the UN has been paying villagers to plant lines of sisal in order to tamp down the dunes. The beaches are pristine and there is no development whatsoever. Soja Lahimaro, the dynamic 39-year-old Chinese-educated governor of Androy, says that there is more to his region than the keré and that he has 245kms of undeveloped coastline (though, he admits, tourists could not reach the coast even if they wanted to).

I say that it seems incredible to me that this region has been ignored for so long by governments in faraway Antananarivo. Could it be that politicians there don’t care about Androy and also look down on this poor region? “Exactly!” says Mr Lahimaro. Maybe worried he has let something undiplomatic slip that he should not, he rapidly changes gear and says that President Andry Rajoelina has pledged to tarmac RN13. Outside his office stand three earthmovers that have just arrived. It is not the first time Malagasy presidents have pledged to rebuild this road though.

Meanwhile men, women and children struggle through the region’s sandstorms on foot, bike and zebu-drawn cart. Why don’t people get angry? My driver, who works for a company in Fort Dauphin, tells me he has three children and earns €45 ($53) a month and his wife, who is a teacher, earns €50. They cannot make ends meet. Asked why people don’t demonstrate, he says that the authorities would order the security forces to shoot at them. People may be poor and angry, he says, but “they have fear in their hearts”. Forget happy dancing lemurs. This is the real Madagascar.