Niger's children starving to death by BBC News / Radio Nederland / UN News 8:14am 20th Jul, 2005   19 July, 2005    "Niger children starving to death", by Hilary Andersson . (BBC News, Maradi, southern Niger)    Children are dying of starvation in feeding centres in Niger, where 3.6m people face severe food shortages, aid agencies have warned.    The crisis in the south of the country has been caused by a drought and a plague of locusts which destroyed much of last year's harvest.    Aid agency World Vision warns that 10% of the children in the worst affected areas could die. They say the international community has reacted too late to the crisis.    Niger is a vast desert country and one of the poorest on earth. Millions of people, a third of the population, face food shortages.    "We're completely overwhelmed... the response has been desperately slow", said Milton Tetonidis from Medecins Sans Frontieres.    Families are roaming the parched desert looking for help. One family we came across did not even know where they were going. "I'm wandering like a madman," the father said. "I'm afraid we'll all starve." They were hundreds of miles from the nearest food distribution point. Aid agencies estimate that tens of thousands of children are in the advanced stages of starvation. Children are dying daily in the few feeding centres there are, where their place in the queue could make the difference between life and death.    'Not equal'    Amina is so starved she cannot eat even if she wants to. "She vomits as soon as I give her food or water," says her mother. "As far as I'm concerned, God did not make us all equal - I mean, look at us all here. None of us has enough food."    A severe drought last year, combined with a plague of locusts, destroyed much of the crop that was needed to feed the people and the cattle they rely on. Now, across the windswept plains of the Sahel, carcasses of cattle litter the landscape. Rains have come - but so late they are now a curse, bringing malaria and other disease.    Little foreign aid has come into the country to deal with this crisis so far. Aid agencies in the country predict the situation will get worse in the coming months and say the world has responded too late.    "There are children dying every day in our centres," says Milton Tetonidis of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). "We're completely overwhelmed, there'd better be other people coming quickly to help us out - I mean, the response has been desperately slow."    UN bodies and NGOs are appealing for donations through their websites. The hunger in Niger was predicted months ago - but that did nothing to prevent the present disaster.    It did nothing to save Rabilou, a tiny child afflicted by starvation and infection, who died within a few hours of our arrival.    20 July 2005    "Famine in Niger - another crisis that could have been prevented", by Pieternel Gruppen. (Radio Nederland Wereldomroep)    UN Humanitarian Affairs chief Jan Egeland said on 19 July that around 25 million euros is needed to tackle the current crisis in Niger, where three-and-a-half million people face the threat of starvation. Although it's not the first time this part of Africa has suffered severe hunger, the government and the outside world have once again reacted much too late.    Niger is one of the world's poorest nations, and each year it struggles with food shortages. The ongoing process of desertification - believed to be intensified by global warming - is a major problem, as are regular periods of drought.    Even in a 'normal' year, around one million people require food aid. This year, however, that figure has more than trebled, because of a continuing lack of water. Two harvests have already failed, and anything which did manage to grow has been devoured by locusts.    Leaves and roots    "The food reserves have gone," says José Tegels of Dutch development organisation SNV:"People are doing anything they can to scrape together some food. In the countryside particularly, you see mainly women and children gathering leaves to eat, or digging for roots."    Each day, José Tegels sees severely malnourished children being brought to the local hospital, founded by medical charity Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders). Many of these children die, having lost their resistance to disease and illness through years of malnutrition.UN Under-Secretary-General Jan Egeland    Warnings in 2004    Hunger is not a new problem in Niger, and the current crisis has not come out of the blue. In October last year, warnings were issued from various quarters about the onset of famine if measures were not taken quickly. "The government responded very slowly," says Mieke Hartveld of Dutch development charity NOVIB: "I don't quite know why the government has abandoned a quarter of the population to their fate." However, she suspects that the government in Niger may have chosen not to acknowledge that there was an emergency developing for fear of causing panic so close to the country's presidential elections at the end of 2004. As Mieke Hartveld sees it, this failure by the government deprived the outside world of the opportunity to offer help.    However, it's not only the national government which is being criticised. The United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, certainly seemed to be accepting some of the blame for the situation when he spoke on Tuesday: "We could have prevented this, and the world community didn't." Mr Egeland also said that donors have focused too little attention on this humanitarian crisis.    José Tegels has the following response: "It's true that hunger in other countries gets relatively more attention. The public at large does not know about Niger; it is a relatively quiet country and hence it seldom makes world news."    Now, with the world's media slowly beginning to report on the crisis, contributions from donor nations are also starting to trickle in at the UN. But, the late response also means the amount now needed has grown considerably. If the world had done something last year, it would have cost just one US dollar (about 82 eurocents) per child to prevent malnutrition. Now, according to Jan Egeland, it will take 80 dollars (66 euro) to save a child's life.    It will be some time before sufficient food supplies reach Niger, a country which faces an extra handicap because it has no direct access to the sea. By the time enough aid does get through, it will have come too late for many, most of them babies and young children.    © Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, all rights reserved    7 July 2005    More than 10 million people are facing food shortages in six Southern African countries. (UN News)    Calling for pledges of $266 million or nearly half a million tons of food immediately to stave off a humanitarian crisis, United Nations agencies today said more than 10 million people are facing food shortages in six Southern African countries this year after erratic weather and late planting reduced their agricultural production.    Making the appeal, the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) met in Johannesburg, South Africa, to consider these findings reported by Crop and Food Supply Assessment Missions (CFSAMs).    Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe have not been able to grow enough food to meet their domestic needs and serious food shortages would persist from now until the next harvest in May 2006, the agencies said.    The CFSAMs calculated that the six countries would need to import about 2.8 million tons of food, while Vulnerability Assessment Committee (VAC) reports estimated that the international community would need to provide about 730,000 tons of food aid for the people most at risk.    The food shortages have been caused by many factors, but primarily erratic weather and inputs that were late or too expensive, such as seeds and fertilizer, the agencies noted. Chronic poverty and the HIV/AIDS pandemic have also been significant contributors to the problems of agricultural output, they said.    The 13 SADC Member States produced a cereal surplus of 2.1 million tons compared with 1.1 million tons a year ago. Most of the excess was produced by South Africa, which harvested a surplus of about 5.5 million tons this year, the agencies said.
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