Henry Foy
10 million face conditions of 1984 Ethiopia famine
Severe crisis: A woman with her malnourished baby at an intensive nutritional rehabilitation centre in Tanout, southern Niger, late April.
Starving people in drought-stricken west Africa are being forced to eat leaves and collect grain from ant hills, say aid agencies, warning that 10 million people face starvation across the region.
With food prices soaring and malnourished livestock dying, villagers were turning to any sources of food to stay alive, said Charles Bambara, Oxfam officer for the west African region.
“People are eating wild fruit and leaves, and building ant hills just to capture the tiny amount of grain that the ants collect inside. The situation here in Chad is desperate. There is not enough food in the country, over 2 million people here are not getting enough,” said Mr. Bambara.
In Niger, which the United Nations classifies as the world's least developed country, starving families are eating flour mixed with wild leaves and boiled plants.
More than 7 million people — almost half the population — face food insecurity in the country, making it the hardest hit by the crisis.
According to U.N. agencies, 2,00,000 children need treatment for malnutrition in Niger alone.
“Niger is at crisis point now and we need to act quickly before this crisis becomes a full-blown humanitarian disaster,” said Caroline Gluck, an Oxfam representative in the country.
With food prices spiralling, people are being forced to slaughter malnourished livestock, traditionally the only form of income.
“When you walk through the markets, you can see that there is food here. The problem is that the ability to buy it has disappeared. People here depend on livestock to support themselves, but animals are being killed on the edge of exhaustion, and that means they are being sold for far less money. And on top of that, the cost of food basics has risen,” explained Ms. Gluck.
Compounding the crisis, thousands of animals have starved to death as villagers use animal fodder to feed themselves. Oxfam has launched a £7-million emergency appeal to try to avert a humanitarian catastrophe, after failed harvests and widespread drought brought severe hunger and malnutrition across the region. Save the Children has launched a separate £7 million appeal.
“This is just the beginning of the traditional hunger period, and people have already been forced to sell their livestock. This is very early for the alarm bells to be ringing, before Niger has even reached the start of the most critical part of the food calendar. You can imagine three to four months down the line how shocking the situation will be,” said Ms. Gluck.
“Yesterday I saw women sifting through gravel at the side of the road, trying to find some grains that may have been blown from aid trucks,” said Ms. Gluck, as hungry and impoverished villagers flocked to the country's capital, Niamey, in search of food. Ms. Gluck has likened the developing situation to that of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, during which an estimated 1 million people died due to drought and a slow response to the crisis both within the country and internationally. “West Africa has traditionally not been very high on the developed world's priority list. The question now is how many people do we have to see die before the world will act?” she said. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010
2 comments:
That is a haunting picture. What's more disturbing is the fact that the problem is not the availability of food, but the means to access it.
Article 25 of the UN Declaration of human rights states, "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including FOOD, clothing, housing and medical care..." While I cannot deny the efforts of the WFP in combating world hunger, it is difficult to applaud them when there are entire nations suffering from malnutrition and the first objective of their Strategic Plan is to "Save lives and protect livelihoods in EMERGENCIES." Personally, I think they should scrap this point, rethink what constitutes an emergency, and focus on their 5th objective which includes "hand-over strategy." What do you think?
links:
http://www.wfp.org/about/strategic-plan
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
This article disturbs me on a visceral level, partly because of the time I've spent with people living in Niger. What disturbs me the most is that the international community will most likely not act to prevent this crisis, but will publicly lament the deaths afterwards.
I spoke with the director for the Boston University Niger study abroad program, who said she calmed a worried parent who was afraid her daughter would not have enough food when she studied abroad this coming semester. The program director calmly replied: "The grocery store shelves are stocked. For those with disposable income, there may be fewer choices, but the concept of even going hungry is null."
I think the concept you brought up about waiting until EMERGENCIES strike is essential. Is our goal to mend the dam of international crises or is it to fix the dam before it bursts?
I am therefore raising this question: What can we do to help this situation before people start dying?
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