Desert blooms with first rains but hunger continues

The normally dusty Sahelian plains around Gao in eastern Mali are vividly green after the first rains, but there’s still not enough food to go around. Aid workers have recorded a particularly high number of malnourished children and an emergency food distribution programme has swung into action. Some 95 km southwest of Gao, along dusty, desert tracks - and now it’s the rainy season, the occasional muddy slick - lies the village of Marsi. Here, one in five children are malnourished according to French NGO, Action Contre la Faim (ACF), which is delivering food aid in the region. Mohamed is 15 months old. He is malnourished and receiving food supplements as part of the ACF programme. "His only illness is that he doesn’t have enough to eat," said his mother, 45-year-old Fati Mohamed as she joggles Mohamed, her youngest of seven children, in her lap. He's crying and irritable. She sits crossed legged in the low entrance of the family home, a domed 'tent' made from thatch and wood. Despite his age, Mohamed can't stand up unaided and his head flops heavily on his small frame. Nonetheless, Fati is pleased with his progress. "Back in March, before the rains came, he was very thin and I was worried. He’s been brought up on goat’s milk as I could not produce my own but then there was nothing for the goats to eat and they stopped producing milk too," Fati explained. For several weeks the little boy had to manage on pounded millet mixed with water into a thin porridge - his mother had nothing else to offer him. "I really thought he might die as he got too thin," she said. ACF began emergency food distributions to Marsi in mid July. Since then, Mohamed and nearly 100 other children between the ages of 6 months and five years have been receiving corn-soya blend food supplements. Even now, Fati and the rest of the family eat only one meal a day of plain or salted millet, a starchy grain that can be pounded or boiled. Similar stories of hunger are emerging from countless villages in the Sahelian desert fringes that run from Mauritania in the west to Chad in the east. Every year the residents of Marsi have to endure a belt tightening lean season. But this year is particularly bad after a double tragedy of drought and West Africa’s worst locust invasions for 15 years struck in 2004. Crops and vegetation withered in the ground or were eaten by the locust swarms. The residents of Marsi are semi-nomadic Tamacheks. They speak the same language as their better known Touareg neighbours and like them, are dependent on their livestock for survival. It was when their herds of goats and cattle began to get emaciated and even die, that the residents of Marsi’s own existence became precarious. "When there's no rain we have nothing and can only sell our animals to survive," said 35-year-old Mohammed A’hmed Ag Moya, who counts himself fortunate to have got this far through the year with five goats and one camel to his name. But skinny goats fetch a low price at market. At the same time, staple foods such as millet, sorghum and rice are selling at up to twice the seasonal rate. "The cereals are there but these people can’t afford to buy them," said Patricia Hoorelbeke, ACF head of mission for Mali and Niger. North of Gao, where the terrain is drier, life is even more precarious and ACF estimate one in four children are malnourished. Another 300 km north, in Kidal, one in three children are malnourished, said Hoorelbeke. Severely malnourished children, who are so hungry that their lives are in danger, are brought to hospitals for treatment. At the moment there are 20 children in the main hospital in Gao who are severely malnourished. A total of 60 to 70 children have been treated since the crisis began. But aid workers warn that the figures belie a more serious problem as they are derived only from populations they have been able to track down and assess. "Though the severe cases found on the ground are brought to the hospital here in Gao for treatment, it is often difficult to find them as they are from nomad families who move around," said Dr Clara Marti Mashoooka, a paediatrician and nutritionist working with ACF. None of the children from Marsi have needed specialist treatment in Gao, and the chief hopes that if the rains continue, the villagers fortunes can only get better. "If there are bad rains, then neither the farmers nor those who live off their animals, will have a good year," said Mahmoud Abdoulayi, chief of Marsi. "The rain is here for the moment, if it continues that is good. But perhaps the locusts will return and they will eat everything," he said.