Government distributes cut-price grain to help ease hunger

The government of Burkina Faso has bought a further 5,000 tonnes of cereal to sell at reduced prices to people in northern areas hit by crop failure to stop them going hungry. But a spokesman for the Agriculture Ministry said much more would be needed over the coming months to prevent famine. The latest batch of subsidised food will go on sale in the northern regions of Soum, Seno and Oudalan, where people are struggling to cope with the after-effects of locust invasions and poor rains in 2004. Residents there will be able to buy a 100 kg bag of subsidised grain for 5,500 CFA (US $11), just over a quarter of the current market price of around 20,000 CFA (US $40). "In order to allow the population from areas severely hit by the disaster to manage... the government has decided to purchase 5,000 tonnes of cereal for them," the government said in a statement on Thursday. It described the current food shortages as "worrying". A spokesman for the Agriculture Ministry told IRIN on Friday that 9,000 tonnes of subsidised grain had already been sold to people in areas of serious food shortage in two separate operations since November last year. He predicted that the government would probably have to sell a total of 100,000 tonnes of grain at knock-down prices to vulnerable population groups before the next harvest begins in September at the end of the current rainy season. Such an operation would cost about US $4 million, he added. The government of Burkina Faso, the world's third poorest country according to the UN Human Development Index, has declared that 1.6 million of its 12 million people are at risk from food insecurity. The struggle to find food is acute in much of the semi-arid Sahel region this year, after locusts and drought combined with deadly effect to wipe out crops along the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Burkina Faso's northern neighbours, Niger and Mali, have been even harder hit. About 3.6 million people are in need of food aid in Niger and aid workers say that as many as 350,000 children under five in the vast landlocked country could be severely malnourished. An IRIN correspondent who visited some of the worst-hit areas of the country earlier this month found that some people had resorted to eating leaves of wild bushes. The government of Mali says 1.1 million of its own people are also likely to go hungry before the new harvest begins. Back in Burkina Faso, officials said food shortages in the north of the country had been exacerbated by traders selling grain over the border to Niger and Mali, where prices were higher. Burkina Faso lost almost 20 percent of its crops nationwide, government statistics show, with the north taking a battering. In Oudalan district, 90 percent of the grain harvest was wiped out. Seno lost 78 percent of its crops and Soum 74 percent. People in the north, where most people earn their meagre livelihoods from the land, have begun to migrate south to find better-paid jobs in the capital Ouagadougou. Nineteen-year-old Esther Tiendrebeogo recently left her family behind in the north to come and work as a cleaner. "The job covers my own needs and allows me to help my family cope with the food crisis," she told IRIN. "I earn 10,000 CFA (US $20) a month and I send half of that back to my parents to help them survive." Sibi Ouedraogo, 22, told IRIN he had hitch-hiked his way 200 km from Ouihagouya to try to find work in the capital. "I'll take any job that pays," he said. "My family have nothing left eat. I have to sort it."