Famine-stricken to get food loans rather than free food

Faced by the prospect of more than three million people going hungry, the government of Niger has opted not to give food away free, but instead to 'loan' food to those most at risk of famine, officials told IRIN on Monday. At a meeting on Monday with donors, UN agencies and NGOs, Prime Minister Hama Amadou said the government was planning to launch what he called "countryside credits" to deal with the food crisis ravaging parts of Niger, where supplies have run dry due to last year's locust attacks and drought. Just over a week ago Amadou issued "an anguished appeal to the international community for emergency food aid." The UN has called for more than US $16 million to help deal with what it calls Niger's "silent crisis", and aid officials said on Tuesday that help had begun to arrive, with around 20 percent of the funds now covered. Under the novel food credit scheme, being tested for the first time in this vast arid country, people facing severe food shortages will be given three 100-kg sacks of grain to tide them through the couple of months left of the lean season, ahead of harvests in September. After the harvests, farmers who were loaned the three sacks of millet or sorghum will reimburse the government, Seydou Bakari, the coordinator of the government's food crisis unit, told IRIN. It was not immediately clear whether the reimbursement would be in kind or in cash. Bakari said it was critically important for Niger that farmers be helped to overcome the food shortage during the weeks leading up to the harvest. This is the hoeing season when farmers need all their energy, and food shortages can lead to a decrease in the amount of land being cultivated as a hungry farmer may choose to work for someone else for cash, he said. The advantage of the food loan idea, Bakari said, "is that it gives access to grains to people who are poor without harming development mechanisms." Last week, up to 2,000 people marched in Niamey to demand free food for people in the dusty interior, so hungry they have been driven to eat wild plants and scavenge in anthills for leftover scraps. Niger is ranked the world's second poorest country by the UN, with 63 percent of its 12 million people living on less than a dollar a day. But life has been even harder since last year, when swarms of hungry locusts and lack of rain caused the loss of about 15 percent of Niger's average cereal production and almost 40 percent of its livestock. NGOs say one out of five children are at risk of serious malnutrition in southern parts of the country. But at Monday's high-level meeting, donors, aid agencies and the government brushed aside suggestions of distributing food for free for the moment. "The situation is serious this year but not out of control," said Gian Carlo Cirri of the World Food Programme (WFP). "We haven't yet reached the stage of a generalised famine calling for massive distributions of free food to keep people alive." "What is needed is an emergency response aimed at people at risk that also maintains the mechanisms supporting subsistence means." Also at the meeting were members of the European Union, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP). Niger regularly suffers from cereal shortages and the government oversees a food bank system that supplies grain to areas where stocks are low. This allows residents to buy, for example, 100 kilos of millet at the subsidised price of 10,000 CFA (US $20), half the market price. Bakari told IRIN last week that the government had already provided 42,000 tonnes of cereals at below-market prices and set up more than 1,200 centres where people could work in exchange for food or cash. He said the government was not against free distributions of food but that it had neither the money nor the food supplies to provide such assistance. Even if the money were there, Bakari added, it would be difficult to buy in enough cereals because neighbouring countries had also been affected by the crisis. Some six million people across West Africa's semi-arid Sahel region face famine after last year's invasion of locusts and drought destroyed their crops and grazing land.