Government launches "anguished appeal" for food aid

Niger made an "anguished appeal" this weekend for food aid to help millions of hungry people, in a bid to stifle its critics who have called for a day of street protests against the government's handling of the crisis. "Almost three million people in Niger are today at risk of hunger." Prime Minister Hama Amadou told parliament on Saturday. "I want to....solemnly launch an anguished appeal to the international community for emergency food aid." Earlier this month, the UN called on donors to stump up more than US $16 million, to help deal with what it called Niger's "silent crisis". Last week Jan Egeland, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said there were still zero commitments. Niger, an arid, landlocked nation ranked the second poorest in the world, was hit by drought and swarms of locusts last year. About 15 percent of the West African nation's average cereal production and almost 40 percent of the country's livestock fodder was lost. Now granaries lie empty and cereal prices are soaring while the market price for cattle and other animals has plummeted. With more than 150,000 children already showing signs of severe malnutrition, Egeland has called the disaster unfolding in Niger "the number one forgotten and neglected emergency in the world". Local officials say many villagers have resorted to wild plants to survive and others have been scavenging in ant-hills in the hopes of finding grains of cereal left over by insects. A group of Niger's civil society associations has called for demonstrations on Thursday to protest against the government's lack of action. "People should come out in massive numbers and show their disapproval of the authorities' indifference," it said in a statement on Friday. Earlier in the year, civil groups managed to get the government to scrap a new tax on staple food items with a series of street protests and stay-at-home strikes. The main opposition party, the Democratic and Socialist Party of Niger (PNDS), has also jumped on the bandwagon, accusing President Mamadou Tandja's government of "genocidal behaviour" in its handling of the crisis. "The PNDS calls on the government to organise a systematic and free distribution of essential foodstuffs in all the affected areas instead of the current partisan policy of selling cereal at reduced prices," the party said in a statement. Niger usually suffers from cereal shortages and the government oversees a food bank system that supplies cereal 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. Amadou, in office since January, told parliament at the weekend that the government had already provided 42,000 tonnes of cereals at below-market prices but it was not enough. Humanitarian officials point out that the opposition's suggestion to distribute free food across all affected areas is not as straight-forward as it might seem. "In the less affected areas, there is the risk that you would break the mechanisms that are in place to guarantee food security in the long-term," Michel Falavigne, the representative for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Niger, told IRIN. "This is not the time for polemics. One should not add a political aspect to a food and humanitarian crisis".