Food deficit still critical

Poor harvests brought on by drought have caused people in Niger to leave their villages in search of sustenance in one of the worst food crises the Sahelian country has seen in over 15 years, according to state officials.
In early April, the government had appealed to its international partners for 60,000 mt of cereals to help cover the country’s food shortage. The Foreign Ministry reported on 13 April that about 40 percent of Niger’s 10,094 villages had experienced food deficits of over 50 percent following a shortfall of 163,000 mt in the 2000 agricultural season. The affected area has nearly 3.6 million inhabitants or 35 percent of the country’s population, the Foreign Ministry said.

Nafoga Adamou, head of the Early Warning Unit at Niger’s Systeme d’Alerte Precoce/Gestion des Crises (Early Warning/Crisis Management System), told IRIN on Tuesday that “the situation is still critical because the state had asked for about 60,000 mt but since its appeal only about 10,000 mt have been received”.

He said the food deficit had caused population movements since December in 20 of Niger’s 36 ‘arrondissements’(counties), although the number of internally displaced people was still unknown. In some cases, he said, only able-bodied persons had migrated and some of them have been going back periodically to their villages to take food to their relatives. However, in 15 of the 20 affected counties, entire families have left.

Rains have started in some areas, especially in the south, and this has reduced the population movement there, according to Nafoga, but the north is still dry.

Niger’s government has called on its diplomatic missions to encourage its citizens overseas to donate to the SAP/GC, send help directly to their home villages or lobby charitable and other organisations to help the country. Both Nafoga and a source at Niger’s embassy in Abidjan told IRIN that Niger citizens abroad had been responding to the call.

Nafoga said this year’s crisis was reminiscent of the last major case of food insecurity in Niger, which occured during a devastating drought in 1984 that halved the country’s cattle herd.