As erratic weather upends the seasonal rhythms that crops depend on, farmers in the island nation of Madagascar are feeling the effects but struggle to adapt to the new normal. That’s one of the key takeaways of a recent survey of nearly 500 small-scale farmers in the country’s northern Sava region, which produces about two thirds of the world’s vanilla beans. In the new study, published March 7 in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers from Duke University and Madagascar’s University of Antananarivo interviewed 479 farmers about the challenges to their livelihood and what they’re doing to cope.
The results were striking. According to the study, nearly all farmers in the area are experiencing changes in temperature and rainfall that make farming more difficult than it used to be. They were already struggling to feed their families, the data show. But while most said they expect things to get worse in the future, remarkably few are altering their farming practices to adapt. READ MORE
An interdisciplinary research team recently launched an NIH-supported project aimed at investigating infectious diseases at the human-animal interface in Northeastern Madagascar. The team will model disease transmission within and across small mammals (rats, bats, and tenrecs), domesticated mammals (cats, cows, pigs, and dogs), and humans by screening humans and animals for a wide range of diseases, undertaking rigorous surveys of people and their environments, and conducting sophisticated mathematical modeling to represent connections between humans and animals in a network framework.
