Torrential floods in West Africa hurt food security
DESIRE DANGA and MAHAMAT RAMADANE SOULOUKNA Mourga plodded through his flooded millet and cotton field in northern Cameroon and uprooted soggy stems that had a few bolls on them. All six hectares of mostly dead crops were under water. The 50-year-old father of 12 is one of an estimated 4 million people, many of them small subsistence farmers, in over a dozen countries in West and Central Africa that have seen their crops decimated by unusually heavy flooding. The floods have destroyed harvest for this season, while nearly 1 million hectares of farmland across the region remain under water, with…