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Famine an affliction of the poor

Jeevan Vasagar

Women are served food last and the elderly end up at the bottom of the pile

TERBADEEN (NIGER): Her face is seamed and her arms are painfully slender, but Mohadien Goumar is only 45. Her neighbour Aminata Musa, who is about 60, lies barely moving on a wooden pallet, staring at the world with flat, bloodshot eyes; dependent on the charity of fellow villagers to keep her alive.

As aid agencies focus their scant resources on saving malnourished babies and children, the elderly are the forgotten victims of the crisis in Niger.

The village of Terbadeen, a Tuareg settlement of thatched huts surrounded by sand and thorny trees, has been stripped of its fittest inhabitants: two-thirds of the men have left in search of work elsewhere.

Nothing but water

``I have had nothing but water for two weeks,'' said Ms. Mohadien. ``The food foreigners have sent, I have not seen it. The men who left the village said they would send food back, but no food has come.''

Throughout Niger, the hunger crisis is an affliction of the poor. While people in Terbadeen starve, there is food in the markets of the nearest big village, Abalak, 6 km away down a winding dirt track. And in the hotels of the capital, Niamey, breakfast coffee comes with seven cubes of white sugar lining the saucer.

Even here among the poorest, there is a hierarchy.

The village chief, Salaman Mahamadou, a regal hawk-nosed man in a navy blue robe, still has the best diet of anyone in the community. The villagers share food with each other, watering down the tiny amounts of rice they can afford, but women are served last and the elderly are at the bottom of the pile.

The people of Terbadeen were herders and subsistence farmers, whose wealth was tied up in their cattle and goats. When drought and locusts destroyed the pasture land, the animals wasted away. The villagers tried to sell their surviving livestock, but no one would pay a high price for a skinny, starving goat or cow.

``I sold goats to get some millet before,'' Ms. Mohadien said. ``I had 100 goats, and sold 10 of them. The others all died.''

Aid is beginning to arrive in Niger. But until three weeks ago, it was Government policy not to distribute free food to the worst-affected communities, because of concern that it would disrupt the markets.

That has changed, and the U.N. plans to start the first general distributions of food aid next week, targeting 2.5 million people. Even then, it will take time to reach every affected village in a vast, landlocked country where the aid must be brought hundreds of kilometres by road.

The focus of the aid effort is on helping those most at risk: babies and young children between six months and five years.

``They are the most vulnerable in the family, nearly always the ones that first show signs of malnutrition,'' said Anita McCabe, a spokeswoman for the aid agency Concern.

In Terbadeen, the village chief points at women and holds up fingers to show how many babies they have lost. He gestures at a tall girl in a flower-patterned gown, whose name is Zeinabu. ``She lost two children, twins, they were eight months.''

Then, pointing at another: ``That is Reshatou. Her baby was two weeks old when it died.''

By the roadside on the way to Terbadeen, parties of children from nearby villages gather weeds to eat. Carrying faded sacks that once held flour, they pluck up small, leafy plants which will be boiled with salt and spices. ``We have nothing else to eat,'' said Adama Zachary, a girl of perhaps 15, her hair tied back with a red bandanna.

``The locusts ate the millet and there is no money to buy food in the market.'' Dead cattle and donkeys litter the fields; piles of bleached bones and wrinkled hides.

At one spot, there are 11 cattle carcasses, which villagers say were dumped there by a truck heading to market after they all died from lack of fodder. The scale of the need in this region became apparent on Wednesday morning, when 1,500 mothers brought their babies to an aid agency distribution intended to feed 500 malnourished babies.

Long queues of women and babies wound through the heart of a mud hut village which had been chosen as the distribution point, more than 160 km south of Terbadeen. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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