IF nothing else, the food crisis in Niger is an object lesson in the complexity of assessing, managing and resolving the myriad tasks of saving millions from starvation. Given continued climate change and increasing aridity as the Sahara desert moves south, inadequate harvests, coupled with plagues of locusts, will blight the region for many coming years. These problems will challenge all involved insofar as dealing with the disasters is concerned.
Niger has produced a series of dangerous contradictions. The UN’s World Food Program, which for the last six weeks has been bringing aid to the stricken area, now says that with the harvest about to come in, it is sharply scaling back its relief supplies in order not to affect the local market price of grain. On the face of it, this is eminently sensible. In other crisis, such as in Ethiopia, a superabundance of aid food crippled the local agricultural economy, providing the farmers with no incentive to plant the next harvest and so exacerbating the very problems the food aid was originally meant to address and solve.
Independent charities, however, including Medicins sans Frontiere (MSF), claim that in Niger, the cut back to cover only desperate parts of the population is premature. They point out that the food flow which should have begun in July did not because promised donations from governments simply did not materialize. Whatever the yield of the local harvest — and the UN World Food Program admits it is still assessing the quality of the crop — there are too many people in Niger who are physically weak from lack of proper nourishment. Thus they are now prey to diseases which healthy, well-fed people could easily resist.
Meanwhile, Niger’s Prime Minister Hama Amadou has spoken of the blow to his country’s dignity in having to rely on foreign food aid. It was clearly bad enough to have to go cap in hand to the world for charity but it was far worse, not to say fatal in many cases, to discover that the promises were no more than words. Part of the problem may lie in the argument as to whether Niger was experiencing a full-blown famine or simply “a food crisis.”
To frightened villagers whose food stores are now empty and whose local harvests seem set to fail, the question is not one of dignity but of sufficient food to avoid starvation. No one should doubt the sincerity of the views of all parties. At the same time, what has been demonstrated by the heated exchanges between the UN, the nongovernmental organizations and the Niger authorities is the lack of a clear overall plan to deal with any food emergency, however severe or however temporary. Unfortunately, it is certain that Niger is not going to be the last sub-Saharan country to suffer these problems. It must thus be hoped that the UN and the NGOs are really learning lessons from Niger about how to balance sustaining the local agricultural economy with the urgent needs of the hungry and malnourished. It would be depressing indeed if the confusion and cross-purposes in this emergency were repeated in the future in a similar crisis.
