2,000 march in capital to demand free food after drought and locusts

Thousands of people marched in the streets of the Niger capital Niamey on Thursday to denounce their government’s inability to respond to food shortages and demand free food distributions in the dusty interior where populations are starving, according to demonstration organisers. Brandishing slogans such as “We are hungry!” or “Free food distributions!” some 2,000 people tramped through Niamey according to organisers the Democratic Coordination of Civil Society (CDSC). Police said turn-out was closer to 1,000 people. Nationally more than three million people are at risk of hunger following successive droughts and swarms of locusts that stripped sparse vegetation bare across the arid country last year, according to Nigerien authorities. About 15 percent of the West African nation's average cereal production and almost 40 percent of the country's livestock was lost in a country that is ranked the second poorest in the world by the UN and some 63 percent of the 12-million strong population live on less than a dollar a day. NGOs in the field have recorded alarming malnutrition rates in children under five and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said that in the southern Tahoua and Maradi districts of Niger, one in five children are at risk of serious malnutrition. “The CDSC thinks that when people are hungry they need assistance and have a right to food,” Moussa Tchangari, the CDSC’s spokesperson told IRIN on Thursday. Local government officials and aid workers said that with their granaries now lying empty, many villagers had resorted to eating wild plants to survive and others had been scavenging in ant-hills in the hopes of finding grains of cereal left over by insects. “These people do not have money anymore and could die; the government should not ask them to pay for food,” Tchangari said. Niger regularly suffers from cereal shortages and the government oversees a food bank system that supplies cereals 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 $20), half the market price. Seydou Bakari, the coordinator of the government's food crisis unit, told IRIN on Thursday that the government had already provided 42,000 tonnes of cereals at below-market prices and set up more than 1,200 centres where people could work in exchange for food or cash. He said the government was not against free distributions of food but that it had neither the money nor the cereals to provide such assistance. “Should we distribute the few resources we have and twiddle our thumbs? Or should we find a mechanism that will enable the person who goes to work to buy his or her food ration with the little amount he or she has been able to earn ?” Bakari asked. He added the government did not have the CFA francs 43 billion (US$ 86 million) needed to buy the 223,000 tons of cereals needed to feed the hungry Nigeriens. “We appealed for international assistance but it is not coming”, he added. Last month, the UN called on donors to give more than US $16 million, to help deal with what it called Niger's "silent crisis". On Thursday the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that to date not a single dollar had been pledged. Bakari added that even if the money was there, it would still be very 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.