Aid agencies complain of poor response to famine appeal ahead of G8 summit

Just a week before the world's richest countries gather for the G8 summit in Scotland, international aid agencies have launched a campaign to remind them of their poor response so far to the famine affecting nearly five million people in Niger and Mali. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Oxfam and Action Against Hunger (ACF) all issued fresh appeals this week for food aid for these two landlocked countries on the southern fringes of the Sahara. Both suffered drought and invasion by locusts last year. "International attention is slowly turning to the Sahel, but it has not yet led to sufficient increases in aid to the region," Oxfam Netherlands said in a statement on Thursday. "Donor governments must urgently provide more funding for emergency assistance, especially the provision of food, fodder for livestock and seeds for the coming planting season," it said. ACF noted that more than one in three children under the age of five in Niger and Mali currently suffer from acute malnutrition. But it complained; "Although Mali is on the list of countries being considered for debt relief at the G8 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland next week, and both Mali and Niger are classified as among the poorest countries in the world by the United Nations, there has been almost no response to the call for emergency assistance. On 19 May, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) launched a flash appeal for US $16 million to help an estimated 3.6 million people at risk of famine in Niger. The appeal was subsequently raised to $18.3 million. But an official at OCHA's regional office for West Africa in Dakar said on Thursday that so far only $2.7 million - 15 percent of the sum sought - had been received. Most of this money had come from Sweden, with Norway and Luxembourg providing smaller contributions, he noted. Other pledges of aid had not yet been quantified into cash. Earlier this week, MSF, which runs five therapeutic feeding centres for malnourished children in Niger, said: "food aid is still insufficient in volume and is not free of charge. As such it is still inaccessible for a section of the population. MSF said it had been admitting more than 1,000 children per week to its emergency feeding programmes in Niger for the past month, and more and more weak and skinny kids were continuing to arrive. Food shortages in the Sahel are expected to become progressively more critical over the next few months before the new harvest begins in late September. Grain prices in Mali and Niger have already shot to twice their usual level and livestock prices have plummeted. "This emergency is not taken seriously enough and if nothing is done before November everyone will have to answer for it," said Emmanuel Drouhin, MSF's head of programmes in Niger. It is not just subsistence farmers who are suffering from empty granaries. Nomadic herdsmen have run out of grazing for their cattle which are dying of starvation. "People only eat one meal a day instead of three. Despite health risks, they eat leaves and fruit too bitter for the cattle to eat," said Paul van Wijk, a programme officer of Oxfam Netherlands who has just returned from Niger. "It will take years for the nomadic herder communities to fully recover from this crisis." Oxfam said it had distributed 900 tonnes of subsidised grain to over 100,000 people in Niger in recent months. But that is a drop in the ocean. The government of Niger says it faces a grain shortfall of 223,000 tonnes this year - its biggest food deficit for more than 20 years. In neighbouring Mali, the government says 1.1 million people are at risk of famine as a result of drought and locust invasion. The worst affected area is a broad band of semi-arid land stretching from Kayes in the west through Mopti on the Niger river to Gao in the east. Mauritania was also badly hit by drought and locusts last year, but there has been a more timely response to that country's appeal for food aid.