'Thousands will die in Niger hunger'

Monday August 08, 2005 15:51 - (SA)

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By Boureima Hama

MARADI, Niger - Thousands of tons of international food aid are needed for Niger within the next few weeks if tens of thousands of people are to be saved from starvation, humanitarian groups are warning.

The aid that has been dispatched since the world woke up to the situation in the north African country last month, in the wake of plagues of locusts and drought last year, is far from adequate, they say.

"If international aid does not arrive quickly, something really serious could happen," said Gerome Gasneir of the Spanish branch of Action Against Hunger.

He said that the agency's treatment centres were receiving two to three times more cases of malnutrition than two weeks ago.

Gian Carlo Cirri, the representative of the United Nation's (UN's) World Food Programme in the Niger capital Niamey, said, "We have six to eight weeks to distribute food to 2.5 million people.

"If they are not helped by then, the situation could be much worse than it is today."

Cirri estimated that 23,000 tons of food would be needed in the stricken areas of the country by September, deploring the fact that so far only a third of its aid programme had been funded.

Johannes Sekkeles, head of the mission of the medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) in Niger, also warned that the next two months will be the worst time for the food crisis.

"The next harvests will not take place before the end of September and we don't know if they will be good," a representative of Niger's ministry of agriculture said.

The figure of 2.5 million is the UN estimate of the number suffering from food shortages out of a population of 12 million, of whom 32,000 are children suffering from severe malnutrition who face death without the necessary food and medical treatment.

The UN on Friday raised fivefold to $80 million its estimate of the money needed to tackle a "deteriorating" situation with both food and sanitation, as well as an "increasing" mortality toll.

The UN said that so far only $25 million had been donated, though also on Friday the World Bank extended more than 120 million for emergency food aid.

"There are pockets now where people have no more food and they need to be helped until the next harvest, about mid-September," said the bank's country manager for Niger, Vincent Turbat.

UN co-ordinator for Niger Michele Falavigna on Saturday made "an anguished and urgent appeal to the world to save lives", the day after Unicef Deputy Director General Rima Salah said after visiting an emergency medical feeding centre here that "it is not too late to save many more children".

"When you see a child dying in front of your eyes, that means the food supply and malnutrition situation in the country is very serious," she said.

However the US has disputed the UN estimates of the numbers in need of food assistance and and suggested the figure could be a third of that.

Edward Fox, an assistant administrator with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), said on Friday the number of those in need in Niger was "under a million, probably around 800,000".

"Now that means in some cases, maybe occasionally, supplemental food and in other cases maybe it will mean a daily ration of food to keep them alive," Fox said in Washington.

"If we sent massive amounts of food aid over there the harvest will come in next month and the prices will drop through the floor and it'll destroy their economy," he said.

Asked about the UN estimates, Fox replied, "I can't say why or how they do their numbers up there. We're doing things based upon what we believe the situation to be."