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Photo: IRIN

Mother waits with her malnourished child at a food distribution site Bamou village, Niger, July 2005.

NIAMEY, 8 March 2006 (IRIN) - The Niger government, farmers, aid workers and donors are bracing for tough months ahead as communities hard hit by last year’s hunger crisis begin to run out of the little food they were able to produce. The government estimates that about 1.8 million people are at risk of food shortages this year. While the harvest in late 2005 was good in most parts, families still reeling from last year’s near-famine are far from catching up, having sold off assets and gone deep into debt to keep their families fed. "I was able to harvest a lot of millet," Haladou Karo, a farmer in Niger’s Maradi region, told IRIN. "But today not much is left in the granary because of the debts I had to pay." Government officials and aid experts alike say despite the decent harvest, in 2006 many communities still will not be able to escape the hunger-poverty cycle. "While food security conditions have temporarily improved following the harvest, a severe hunger season (April-September 2006) is expected for the most food insecure households," noted a 15 February bulletin from the USAID Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS). In this desert country as in much of the Sahel region malnutrition is a part of life, particularly during the ‘lean’ season - the period when last year’s harvest has been exhausted but the next is not yet ready. But 2005’s hunger crisis in Niger, triggered in part by locusts and erratic rainfall, severely set families back. For some communities food from the latest harvest has already run dry, and the worry is that families will be forced to go into debt again or sell off any and all assets, aid workers say. A FEWS source says cereal prices are high again this year, which will mean a greater burden for the hardest hit families if they are forced to head to market. "Food prices have already gone up in my region," Issa Mahamadou from Maradi told IRIN. "From 12,000 CFA francs (US $22) for a 100-kg sack of millet during the harvest to 16,000 CFA francs today. And that’s just the beginning….For this reason, we are already taking measures to cope with this, including moderating our consumption." Some villagers worried Many of the villagers who left their homes to find work will return in the coming weeks to prepare for the planting season, thus creating even more mouths to feed where there is little to go around, said Bachir Barke Doka of Swiss Interchurch Aid. "April will be especially difficult because many will return to the villages to prepare for the planting season. That will weigh heavily on the villages." Doka and fellow aid workers met with a number of farmers in Niger in January. "The worry is there. Farmers say it will be very difficult this year - some told us they don’t have enough to feed their families beyond two months." Seidou Bakari, head of Niger’s food crisis unit, said, "We’ve already seen that the situation has degraded sharply" in some zones. The department in a recent report cites Dosso, Tillaberi and Tahoua as the areas with the highest numbers of at-risk populations. The government says free food distributions would be a last resort, but food is being set aside just in case. Instead the government is proposing cash-for-work and food-for-work programmes, in part aimed at boosting agricultural development, as well as community cereal banks. It has proposed a 50.6-billion CFA franc ($92 million) plan to UN agencies and NGOs, appealing for assistance in part to help restock the national food security reserve, which is still far short of the government’s 2006 aim of 110,000 tonnes. Amid its fight to recover from the 2005 food crisis and avoid another, Niger now has to contend with the deadly avian flu virus, which was confirmed in birds from the south of the country in late February. Long-term investment paramount In recent meetings on the food situation, government officials have told the humanitarian community it is critical to focus on longer-term development projects in order to eradicate hunger in the country. And UN agencies and other aid organisations, while bracing for a crisis, are at the same time investing in reinforcing Niger’s health and agricultural sectors. But the fact that so many parts of the country are still playing catch-up this year means resources might have to be used again for emergency aid. Analysts agree, though, that the long-term focus is paramount. John Staatz, agricultural economist and Africa expert at Michigan State University, said the food crisis revealed the longstanding effects of worsening poverty in Niger. "This was the face of a failure to get long-term economic growth,” he said, pointing out that in the region’s farming economies the only way to achieve growth is through long-term investment in the economic motor - agriculture. In early February in a meeting with government officials, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland the United States and the European Union pledged some $12 million and tens of thousands of tonnes of cereal to support Niger food security programmes. UN agencies are focusing on food for work and food for training projects, therapeutic food for malnourished children and pregnant and lactating women, food rations for families of malnourished children, training for health workers, nutritional surveillance, disease prevention and agricultural tools and technical assistance. Sarah Gordon Gibson, WFP deputy director in Niger, agreed that many people are still trying to gain their footing from last year. "They simply have not had the time to recover and rebuild their lives properly," she said, but added, "Child malnutrition is also a problem which requires long-term intervention on many levels and despite massive efforts in recent months it cannot be eradicated overnight." Aid workers say they are hoping that with coordinated government and UN/NGO efforts already in place, they can prevent a crisis on the scale of last year. "We’re taking the opportunity to brace ourselves for what is sure to be a difficult nine months," said Nigel Tricks of the aid organisation Concern, who says the humanitarian community is focusing on mitigation and prevention. "It’s relative," he added. "By any other standard this is still an emergency."