Opinion - News Analysis   

Life in famine-hit Niger

Jeevan Vasagar

The starvation is also the result of a belief that the free market can solve the problems of one of the world's poorest countries.

IN THE Tahoua market, there is no sign that times are hard. Instead, there are piles of red onions, bundles of glistening spinach, and pumpkins sliced into orange shards. There are plastic bags of rice, pasta and manioc flour, and the sound of butchers' knives whistling as they are sharpened before hacking apart joints of goat and beef.

A few minutes' drive from the market, along muddy streets filled with puddles of rainwater, there is the more familiar face of Niger. Under canvas tents, aid workers coax babies with spidery limbs to take sips of milk, or the smallest dabs of high-protein paste. Wasted infants are wrapped in gold foil to keep them warm. There is the sound of children wailing, or coughing in machine gun bursts. "I cannot afford to buy millet in the market, so I have no food, and there is no milk to give my baby," says Fatou, cradling her son Alhassan. Though he is 12 months old he weighs just 3.3 kg.

Fatou, a slender, childlike young woman in a blue shawl, ate weeds to survive before her baby was admitted to a treatment centre run by the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres. This is the strange reality of Niger's hunger crisis. There is plenty of food, but children are dying because their parents cannot afford to buy it.

The starvation in Niger is not the inevitable consequence of poverty, or simply the fault of locusts or drought. It is also the result of a belief that the free market can solve the problems of one of the world's poorest countries. The price of grain has skyrocketed; a 100 kg bag of millet, the staple grain, cost around 8,000 to 12,000 West African francs last year but now costs more than 22,000 francs. According to Washington-based analysts of the Famine Early Warning System Network (Fewsnet), drought and pests have only had a "modest impact" on grain production in Niger. The last harvest was only 11 per cent below the five-yearly average. Prices have been rising also because traders in Niger have been exporting grain to wealthier neighbouring countries, including Nigeria and Ghana.

Niger, the world's second poorest country, relies heavily on donors such as the European Union and France, which favour free market solutions to African poverty. So the Niger Government declined to hand out free food to the starving. Instead, it offered millet at subsidised prices. But the poorest could still not afford to buy.

At the Tahoua market, traders are reluctant to talk about the hunger crisis affecting their countrymen as they spread their wares under thatched verandas jutting out from mud buildings. Last month around 2,000 protesters marched through the streets of the capital, Niamey, demanding free food. The government refused.

The same month, G8 Finance Ministers agreed to write off the country's $2 billion debt.

"The appropriate response would have been to do free food distributions in the worst affected areas," said Johanne Sekkenes, head of MSF's mission in Niger. "We are not speaking about free distribution to everybody, but to the most affected areas and the most vulnerable people."

The U.N., whose World Food Programme distributes emergency supplies in other parts of Africa, also declined to distribute free food. The reason given was that interfering with the free market could disrupt Niger's development out of poverty.

"I think an emergency response should have started much earlier," says Ms. Sekkenes. "Now we find ourselves in this serious nutritional crisis, with children under five who are suffering."

Three weeks ago the Niger Government, its foreign donor countries and the U.N. did a volte-face, jointly agreeing to allow the distribution of free food. Aid is now being flown in from Europe and trucked from neighbouring countries. A total of 3.6 million people live in the regions of Niger affected by the food crisis.

According to the most reliable estimate, some 874,000 people now need free food to survive. The food aid will arrive as children weakened by hunger face a new battle against disease. It is the rainy season in Niger, and the water helps spread diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea.

In the MSF treatment centre, a three-year-old girl called Aminata is suffering from a grotesque eye condition. Her eyeball is so swollen with fluid that it has popped out of her skull and bulges from her face. The doctors call it a retinal blastoma, the result of an untreated eye infection.

"The thing in her eye started off very small," said Aminata's mother, Nisbou. "I did not have money for hospital, so I treated it with herbs, traditional medicine."

The hunger crisis has struck communities that depend on a mix of subsistence farming and herding for their livelihoods.

The stories told by the women in the treatment centre show that their plight began when locusts ate their crop and cattle fodder, but spiralled when the prices of food in the market shot out of reach. In desperate times, adults can get by on the poorest of foods, weeds and the stubble of their crops, but mothers cannot make breast milk on this diet and infants cannot eat weeds.

Amid the anxiety, there are unexpected moments of gaiety in the feeding centre. Asked her age, Nisbou, who is probably about 20, replied: "I am 100 years old." She burst out laughing at her own joke, then looked weary again, and tucked her baby's deformed face under a lace shawl. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

IRA in a reasonable mode
Climate change: Gleneagles and after
New opportunities for nuclear energy
The succession in the House of Saud
The power of holy places
Life in famine-hit Niger
BJP's predicament
Terror in Kashmir
Mumbai woes
Rane in Congress
Blot on democracy
Remembering JRD
"BJP is not the life-breath of the Sangh"

Copyright © 2005, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu