Severe child malnutrition increases in south - MSF

Severe child malnutrition is increasing rapidly in the Maradi and Tahoua districts of southern Niger which were hit by low rainfall and swarms of locusts last year, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) warned on Tuesday. The French-based medical charity said it provided supplementary feeding for 10,000 severely malnourished children in Maradi district 600 km east of the capital Niamey in 2004 and the number of new cases admitted at its feeding centres had gone up from 170 per week to 250 since the beginning of this year. The situation was also serious around Tahoua, 450 km northeast of Niamey, it added. Giancarlo Cirri, the Niger Country Director of the UN World Food Programme, (WFP) told IRIN on Tuesday that more donor funds were needed if WFP were to distribute food to 400,000 people estimated to be vulnerable. “We have appealed for US $3 million, but so far we have only received US $500,000,” Cirri said. “We are working closely with MSF and reports show that malnutrition cases are sky-rocketing. Niger is a hotspot for malnutrition,” he said. MSF warned that one in five children in Maradi and Tahoua districts were at risk of becoming severely malnourished as grain stores emptied and local people began eating leaves and wild berries to stave off hunger. Severe malnutrition is deemed to have set in when a person's weight falls below 70 percent of what is normal for their height. MSF said some farmers in Maradi and Tahoua had become so desperate they were selling their land to buy food. Livestock herders in these arid areas were meanwhile selling off their animals on the cheap since there was barely any pasture left and many women had resorted to selling their jewelry, it added. MSF announced plans to open two new feeding centres in the Maradi district in the next few days and appealed for other aid agencies to join in the relief effort. The organisation said its recent exploratory missions to the Maradi and Tahoua had revealed that time was “running short” if a humanitarian crisis was to be averted. “The first rains will not arrive before May, and we will have to wait until the end of June before pastures begin to recover. As for the first harvest, we’re going to have to wait until September for that,” an MSF logistics expert was quoted as saying. MSF noted that Niger was still three months away from the height of the lean season between harvests when food is traditionally scarce. In 2004, the semi-arid Sahel region of West Africa experienced its worst locust invasion in 15 years. The swarms ravaged vast stretches of farm and grazing land in Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and northern Senegal. Insect damage to crops was compounded in many cases by low rainfall. MSF said that Tahoua and Maradi were regions of Niger worst affected by locusts and drought. Together the twin scourges had destroyed 90 percent of agricultural production in these districts, it added. As MSF sounded the alarm bell in Niger, where the government reckons that 3.5 million people could face food shortages this year, the International Federation of the Red Cross warned of a food crisis developing right across the Sahel region. It estimated that 60 percent of households in Mauritania would suffer food insecurity this year and warned that millions of people in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali were also likely to go hungry. WFP has meanwhile highlighted the danger of an imminent food crisis in Mali as well as Niger. Times are particularly tough in Niger where the government recently imposed a highly unpopular 19 percent Value Added Tax (VAT) on basic goods and services, including food. This is pushing up food prices even further at a time when they are already soaring because of local shortages. A coalition of 30 civil society groups has been staging demonstrations and protest strikes for the past three weeks to try to persuade the government to scrap the new tax. Five leaders of this Coalition Against Costly Living have been arrested and charged with plotting against the state, but the protest movement called off a 24-hour general strike planned for Tuesday as it edged closer to dialogue with the President Mamadou Tandja's government. Landlocked Niger is ranked as the world’s second poorest country by the UN Human Development Index.