Famine and malnutrition loom after double jeopardy of locusts and drought

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, experts have warned. The situation is so bad, that subsistence farmers across the region have started selling their precious livestock and eating the seed corn which they were planning to plant when this years rainy season begins in June. “The combined effect of drought and locust attack, particularly in the more northerly districts of the counties affected, has led to significant damage. The people in these areas need food aid and help to relaunch their own farming efforts in the form of fertiliser and other inputs for the coming planting season,” said Edouard Tapsoba, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) representative in Senegal. The price of staple foodstuffs such as millet, has been soaring across a belt stretching from Mauritania and Northern Senegal, through Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to Chad. In some cases food prices have doubled. In Mali, the price of a 100 kg bag of millet has shot up from 12,000 CFA francs (US $24) to 20,000 CFA ($40) in recent months. At the same time, the market price for cattle and other livestock has plummeted as herdsmen have tried to sell their undernourished animals in order to raise cash to buy grain to keep their families fed. “Access to the main food staples is increasingly difficult for vulnerable households and pastoralists,” said the FAO in a statement released earlier this month. “Severe child malnutrition is increasing rapidly,” it warned. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Action against Hunger and UN agencies have already recorded an alarming rise in cases of malnutrition in children under five in Niger, Mali and Mauritania. MSF said that in the Tahoua and Maradi districts of Niger one in five children were at risk of serious malnutrition.

Impoverished Nigerien children are particularly vulnerable

Last year swarms of locusts stripped crops and grazing vegetation across the Sahel as the region suffered its worst invasion of the insect swarms for 15 years. And while adequate rain fell in many parts of the Sahel, rainfall was more patchy and ended prematurely on the northern fringes of the region, which are virtually semi-desert. “The people do not have anything to sow next year because they have been forced to eat their stock of seeds,” said Caroline Bah, director of Paris-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) Afrique Verte (Green Africa). The situation is even more precarious for pastoralists. “For livestock breeders the problems will not be solved quickly – it takes years to rebuild a herd,” said Bah. According to the government in Niger, almost 40 percent of the country's 10,000 villages have suffered losses to agricultural production. In some cases their entire harvest has been wiped out. The Niger government estimates that 3.9 million people - one third of the country's population - will not eat properly this year. With empty granaries, many villagers in Niger have resorted to scavenging wild plants to survive. “The population has adopted behaviour characteristic of a famine," said Daddy Dan Bakoye, the head of statistics at the Ministry of Agriculture in Niger. "For example, people have been gathering and eating wild plants like ‘anza’ – a very bitter fruit – which they only eat in times of severe shortage,” he told IRIN. In Mauritania too, the government estimates that one third of the population - about 900,000 people - face food shortages and are selling their core assets to survive. “The rural populations develop strategies of survival – they become over indebted, we see the migration of whole families and people are selling their female livestock. It is always a bad sign when people start selling their capital,” said Mohameden Ould Zein, Mauritania’s director of food security. “We are also seeing a resurgence of diseases associated with food insecurity, like child malnutrition and acute respiratory infections,” he added. In Mali, the French NGO, Action Against Hunger, found that one in three children under the age of five in the northeastern Kidal region were already suffering from malnutrition. It has called on the international community for help. The north of Burkina Faso and Senegal also recorded significantly lower production in last year's June to September rainy season..

Farmers at work in northern Burkina Faso

In Senegal as a whole, cereal production last year was 27 percent down on the previous year's record output. Some efforts have already been made to help the most needy. The government of Burkina Faso has distributed food to identified high-risk communities. And in March, the government of Niger launched a programme to sell basic foods stuffs at controlled prices in some of the country's worst hit areas, although it acknowledges that more needs to be done. “The needs are so immense that they cannot all be satisfied,” Dan Bakoye at the Ministry of Agriculture, said. The food crisis did not stop the government introducing a new 19 percent value added tax on basic goods and services in March, pushing food prices still higher. However, six weeks of nationwide protests eventually forced the government to compromise and the tax was eventually removed from wheat flour and milk. In Mauritania, the government appealed for 110,000 tonnes food aid in November, but Ould Zein, the country's director of food security, said that so far only 50 percent had been received. At the end of March, UN agencies appealed for an additional US $38 million of food aid for West Africa to deal with the shortages, but the FAO said donors had been slow to respond. “The additional funds are urgently needed to prevent the situation becoming further aggravated,” it said. It is not just food aid that is needed. Time is running out to get fresh supplies of seed corn to destitute farmers, who in some areas have only two weeks left before they are due to start sowing. “Many farming families will also need seeds and other farming inputs for the next growing season, due to start in late May/June,” the FAO said.