Feeding operation in arid Sahel struggling for cash

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) on Tuesday urged international donors to find funds for the arid Sahel region of West Africa where millions of people are still suffering the after shocks of last year’s regional food crisis. The WFP aims to help feed 3.3 million mostly young children in the Sahelian countries of Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso at a cost of US $54 m, but the programme is 70 percent under funded. Hunger is a perennial problem in the Sahel, an impoverished string of countries that run west to east across the continent along the southern fringes of the Sahara desert. But that is no reason for complacency, warned WFP. “Every year is a crisis year for the poorest people of the Sahel,” said Mustapha Darboe, WFP’s regional director for West Africa, in a press release. “For too long this has been widely considered to be normal and acceptable. It is not. People should not be chronically short of their daily needs in the 21st century." The Sahel's annual lean season, a period of belt-tightening ahead of harvests in October, has started earlier than usual this year as a direct result of last year’s food crisis, according to WFP. Despite a generally strong harvest in late 2005, food stocks across the region remain low and cereal prices are rising on markets. Particularly of concern are feeding operations for 400,000 people in Mauritania, which are nearly 95 percent under funded and food supplies could run out as soon as next month, said WFP. And cereal prices in Mauritania are up to 50 percent higher than normal, said WFP. Last year child deaths from malnutrition soared across the Sahel after crops and vegetation eaten by livestock was decimated by drought and locusts in 2004. Niger, the poorest country in the world according to the UN, was hit hardest. “Last year’s crisis in the region, especially in Niger, was a wake-up call to everyone; invisible hunger and unchecked poverty kill people in West Africa,” added Darboe. Images of skeletal babies in Niger transmitted to television audiences around the world triggered a large-scale humanitarian response there. According to WFP, donor response to needs in Niger is encouraging in 2006 and supplies for that country are guaranteed until September. WFP’s main focus in the Sahel is to improve nutritional levels of children under five. A report issued last week by the UN children’s agency UNICEF said that one in five children born in sub-Saharan Africa will die before their fifth birthday, and that in much of West Africa morality rates for under-fives are on the rise. Over 50 percent of those deaths are attributable to malnutrition, according to WFP’s Darboe, either directly, or because small children's bodies are weakened to such an extent that they die of malaria, tuberculosis or even a bout of diarrhoea.