No More Nigers by Desmond Tutu / Jan Egeland Washington Post / New York Times 2:14pm 1st Aug, 2005   7/8/2005    "Niger is Dying, and the World is merely Watching", by Jan Egeland. (USA Today)    Imagine if your local fire department had to petition the mayor for money every time it needed water to douse a raging fire. That's the predicament faced by anguished humanitarian aid workers when they seek to save lives but have no funds to pay for the water — or medicine, shelter, or food — urgently needed to put out a fire.    Niger is but the latest example of this lethal predicament. Last year, a locust invasion devoured its crops. What the locusts didn't eat, a drought then scorched. For one of the world's poorest countries, already plagued by environmental degradation, this twin calamity is catastrophic.    Immediate aid is needed to keep 2.5 million people alive. Nearly a third of Niger's population is threatened by hunger — and about 800,000 children younger than 5 have empty bellies.    Nine months ago, Niger and the United Nations warned of an impending crisis. In May, the U.N. appealed to international donors for $16 million in emergency aid. The response: near-deafening silence.    Only now has the world at last woken up to the reality that thousands of children in Niger could soon die. Once again, it has taken horrific images of starving children to do so. This crisis could have been averted had political will and resources been available early on. We could have saved children from malnourishment for as little as $1 per child per day. Now it will cost many times more. Aid agencies are racing against time to save lives. But they may be too late, especially for the young children.    Niger's food shortage is acute but far from unique. Across the Sahel, the twin plagues of locusts and drought have left 2.5 million people at risk in Mauritania, Mali and Burkina Faso. Broad swaths of southern Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and southern Africa also face serious food shortages. We must act now in these countries, too.    Let us learn from the tragedy in Niger. Early funding and early action save lives and help prevent a deadly spiral of disease, hunger and displacement from spinning out of control.    In recent years, however, nearly half of all global humanitarian funding has come in the last quarter of the year. These delays are deadly. So, too, is the absence of a predictable pool of money to draw upon immediately in an emergency. Again, think what would happen if your local fire department had to petition for money before turning on the fire hose.    We can and must do better. To that end, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has proposed a 10-fold increase in the U.N.'s emergency fund to enable aid agencies to jump-start operations. This ramped-up $500 million grant would save both money and lives, particularly in forgotten crises such as Congo, Chad or Eritrea.    Focusing attention on these crises is not easy. Too often, it takes horrific stories or images to shock us out of complacency.    I am convinced, however, that people do respond when they know how. To that end, we must shorten the distance between crisis and consciousness, awareness and action. And we must end the tyranny of complacency that has consigned millions of people to this dehumanizing existence.    Humanitarian aid can make a lifesaving difference for so many, so quickly, for so little cost, in these acute crises. The people of Niger know this: That's why many of Niger's citizens, the poorest of the world's poor, have donated to a national fund to assist their less-fortunate neighbors.    Their generosity also transcends borders. When the tsunami struck Asia, the people of Niger opened their hearts and wallets. Niger sent $250,000 to the victims — this in a country where the average income is less than $1 a day.    At a time of unprecedented global prosperity, cannot the rich nations do as much for defenseless, starving children?    (Jan Egeland is the United Nations under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief coordinator).    August 3, 2005    "No More Nigers", by Desmond Tutu. (Washington Post)    The cameras are rolling on another African disaster: Niger and its desperate, starving children have thrust the continent back into the global spotlight. And this tragedy has unfolded on the world's television screens even as leaders of the industrialized countries at the Group of Eight summit pledged a historic amount of debt relief and humanitarian aid to African countries.    Welcome tidings of the affluent world's largess have collided with yet another outstretched hand -- another cry for help -- from our continent. For Niger is not an isolated island of desperation; it lies within a sea of problems across Africa -- particularly the "forgotten emergencies" in poor countries or regions with little strategic or material appeal. Neighboring Mauritania and Mali, south Sudan, southern Africa -- all are "Nigers" waiting to happen.    In most cases, war or tyranny cannot be blamed -- just grinding poverty that forces half the continent to survive on less than a dollar a day, and the lethal overlay of HIV-AIDS that kills about 2 million Africans a year.    The U.N. World Food Program warned as long as nine months ago that Niger, already one of the world's poorest nations, was veering toward catastrophe -- pushed hard by severe drought and the worst plague of locusts in 15 years. But donors were attending to higher-profile crises; then came the Indian Ocean tsunami, which eclipsed Africa's misery on the world scene.    Now the anguish of Niger's children has spurred the outside world to act -- but it is too late for many. Must we wait for these heart-rending images of children dying before we mobilize? We in Africa wonder: Can the world outside see the human beings -- or the potential partners -- behind the unrelenting despair?    How can you absorb even the "everyday" bulletins from Africa that epitomize a continent of bottomless need: the 40 million children kept out of school by poverty; the chronic malnutrition that stunts up to half of all children; the regions, such as southern Africa, where in five years one in five children will be an AIDS orphan?    In southern Africa, the deadly combination of AIDS and food shortages is tearing through the social fabric and infrastructure of our countries -- cruelly reversing the remarkable gains of the post-apartheid era. Teachers, doctors and nurses are dying faster than we can train new ones. So many of our farmers -- close to 8 million -- have succumbed to AIDS that food insecurity is growing even when the rains fall as they should.    In many southern African countries, life expectancy has plunged some 20 years, to 19th-century levels (in Swaziland to a shocking 36 years). Sub-Saharan Africa will be home to 20 million AIDS orphans by 2010. What does their future hold?    Africans wonder: At what point do people out there declare "enough"? Or is the magnitude of this African "reality show" so overwhelming that the rest of the world simply tunes out?    We should also remember the times when millions of people from all over the globe did declare "enough" -- when people refused to stand by while others suffered and died.    I am proud to have belonged to the movement that sprang from within Africa itself to overcome the injustice of apartheid. We could not have won our battle without the steadfast support of our friends in the United States and elsewhere. AIDS is not the first seemingly implacable foe Africans have faced. We can -- with leadership and determination -- conquer this latest plague. To do so, we must muster the spiritual strength and vigor of the American civil rights movement and South Africa's anti-apartheid movement. We know we can count on our friends -- beyond Africa -- to heed our call to action. And we shall be there as partners.    We commend the commitment of donors to write off our governments' debts and to fund the fight against HIV-AIDS in Africa, especially with antiretroviral drugs. But just as with apartheid, one needs to hear the people. They tell us that medication alone will not win the battle. Most of the 30 million HIV-positive Africans don't have the basic nutrients to live fully, let alone ward off tuberculosis and other opportunistic diseases. Adequate food and nutrition are vital.    The same can be said for the broader goals of developing our societies to the point where they can successfully withstand the shocks of nature. Neither fighting HIV-AIDS nor educating our populations nor developing our countries to their capacity can be done on an empty stomach.    It is time to step up and heed the warning signs before the children of yet another "Niger" are catapulted onto the world stage by famine.    (The writer, archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Price in 1984 for his role in fighting apartheid. He wrote this column on behalf of the U.N. World Food Program).    1 Aug 2005    New African food crisis raises the question: Why? By Lydia Polgreen. (The New York Times)    The television pictures are wrenching. A nomad holds an infant aloft, its gaunt head lolling dangerously, its matchstick limbs akimbo. A father asks God to forgive him for weeping publicly; he has just buried his son. A child in an emergency clinic awakens from a hunger-induced stupor only to moan and weep from the pain of his starvation-induced skin sores.    These images of victims of a food crisis in the vast, landlocked west African country of Niger, captured by a BBC television correspondent and shown around the world, look like something the world has seen before - the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s. That catastrophe prompted an extraordinary outpouring of generosity, along with a vow that the world would never again stand by as millions went hungry.    Yet here it seems to be again, far smaller in scale. Once again there is the question: What causes these calamities?    The immediate cause is certainly known. Locust swarms and poor rains last year wiped out much of the country's harvest and caused grain prices to triple. But when misfortunes strike many other countries, governments can help their people, with planning, with resources and by seeking aid from abroad. So what has gone so terribly wrong in Niger?    For decades famine was seen largely as a consequence of bad political leadership. Food scarcity in Ethiopia in the 1980s had natural causes, but its transformation into a famine came to be understood as mostly man-made, the result of a regime's collectivist ideology and its pursuit of victory over rebels without regard to the well-being of its people. It seemed a neat illustration of a dictum by the development economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen: "No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy."    Yet, Niger is a democracy. It has been one since 1999, when it made the transition to multiparty democracy and constitutional rule after a decade of turmoil. It has also made, in part at least, the painful transition from a centralized, state-run economy to a market-driven one, earning praise and ultimately relief from about half of its estimated $1.6 billion in foreign debt from the World Bank.    Yet Niger still earns a horrifyingly low score on the index of human development compiled by the UN Development Program, which lists it as the second least-developed country in the world, just ahead of Sierra Leone.    More than 25 percent of its children die before their fifth birthday. Those who survive go on to scrape a meager existence from a harsh, arid savanna that is just barely suitable for farming and cattle grazing, yet must feed 12 million people. Cyclical droughts and chronic hunger are a way of life. Life expectancy tops out at 46 years.    Nor is Niger alone in its troubles. Of the 25 countries at the bottom of the UN development list, all but two are in Africa. Niger's food crisis - it is not, despite news reports, a famine yet - is not even the worst on the continent. Similar problems, involving even larger numbers, exist in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Darfur in Sudan and elsewhere.    Far from ignoring or playing down its troubles, Niger's government, in cooperation with international aid agencies, sounded the alarm back in November. It provided subsidized grain and other aid from its own stocks, and has apparently made every effort to avert disaster.    "The world has not noticed," said Mark Malloch Brown, chief of staff to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general. "When you get a crisis of this kind in a little-known landlocked country, which is Francophone and hard to reach, the inability to mobilize and galvanize sufficient support in a timely way is huge."    Of the $16 million requested by the United Nations in an appeal for aid, less than a third had been received until about a week ago. Food distribution is well under way, but precious time was lost, Malloch Brown said.    Niger and its neighbors are textbook cases of what Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, in New York, calls "the poverty trap."    "When poverty is extreme, the poor do not have the ability - by themselves - to get out of the mess," Sachs wrote in his recent book, "The End of Poverty".    The prescription for such countries, he said is a large infusion of aid directed to basic needs like growing more food, providing access to clean drinking water and preventing diseases like malaria.    If farmers in Niger got better seeds and fertilizers, he said, they would grow more crops, preventing food shortages in the first place. Children who had safe drinking water would not suffer from diarrhea or its deadly complications, malnourishment and dehydration. Fighting malaria, which debilitates as well as kills, would increase productivity.    Niger may be a democracy, but its government is weak and its tiny budget is almost entirely dependent on foreign aid. It may have a free press, but if literacy is at 17 percent and few can afford radios or televisions, how can a free press safeguard against famine? It may have elections, but if the government has put itself at the mercy of international donors in return for promises of aid, can it be held to account when the world does not live up to its end of the bargain?    In the end, the way out of misery for countries like Niger is neither democracy nor increased aid alone, but a blend of the two, said Stephen Devereux, an expert on famine at the University of Sussex in Britain.
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