Children forced to eat wild leaves as food and cash dry up

It was quiet among the red mud huts of Garhanga as the scorching midday sun rose over the village of 6,000 people in the arid wasteland of central Niger. Women and children chatted under the shade of a huge tree, a rare sight in this rocky landscape dotted with carcasses of parched cattle. But there was no food and nothing to do. And everyone was hungry. “Look!” said Fatima Hamadou, a 23-year-old mother of three, pointing at an empty mud brick granary. “We planted millet, sorghum and beans, but there is nothing in the granary. “We don’t even have seeds to sow for the next harvest.” Landlocked Niger is in the throes of a serious food crisis. A quarter of the country’s 12 million people are expected to go hungry over the next few months until the new harvest begins in September. Last year, the fields around Garhanga in the Tahoua Region of central Niger were attacked by swarms of hungry locusts. But a premature end to the rainy season did even more damage, causing this village to lose 80 percent of its millet and sorghum crop. Ranked as the world’s second poorest country by the United Nations, Niger is no stranger to food shortages even in an average year. But according to the Agriculture Ministry, last year’s poor harvest left the country with a 223,000-tonne shortfall of grain, its biggest deficit for more than 20 years. The prospect of millions of empty stomachs has sent the government scrambling to find solutions and muster international aid. But as the experts in Niamey debate whether or not the emergency rates as a full-blown famine, in remote villages like Garhanga there is little doubt in people’s minds about the gravity of the crisis. Children forced to eat wild leaves “The situation is dramatic,” said Harouna Malicki, the mayor of Garhanga and 50,000 people who live in the surrounding countryside. “There is famine in the commune.” One of the older women, Ada Habsatou, said the food crisis at home had been aggravated by a fall in cash remittances from local men who had gone to seek work in Cote d’Ivoire. That country’s once booming economy, which attracted migrant workers from all over Francophone West Africa, has taken a nosedive after nearly three years of civil war. “The children have all gone to Cote d’Ivoire but they send us nothing. Sometimes we go for days without eating,” Habsatou said. Two out of three people in Niger live on less than US $1 a day, and in the Tahoua region, 400 km northeast of the capital Niamey, young people head for neighbouring countries each year after the annual harvest. They aim to return a few months after making some cash in time for hoeing and sowing before the next rainy season begins in May. But the conflict in Cote d’Ivoire has drastically reduced the job opportunities for seasonal workers. “I’ve had to feed the children with wild leaves,” Habsatou said as one of her 10 grandchildren ran off to fetch a dish full of small bright green leaves that she called “dagna.” “I mix these with a pate made from peanut husks,” she said. “People go for days without eating,” the mayor butted in. “Look at the state of these kids.” One out of five kids suffer malnutrition A short walk away, dozens of women and children were lined up in front of a large white tent erected by the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). “I was told I could get medicine and food here,” said Fatima Aboubacar, a mother of six with a baby in her arms and a toddler by her side. A May survey by MSF showed that one out of five children in the nearby Keita district of Tahoua region was suffering from severe or moderate malnutrition. The group opened three new therapeutic feeding centres between April and 1 June to deal with the crisis. Every Wednesday is market day in Garhanga and a mobile MSF team shows up to check whether local children aged between 6 months and five years are suffering from malnutrition. Inside the tent the children are weighed, measured and examined to see whether they are suffering from severe malnutrition. The broad rule of thumb for determining this is whether they are more than 30 percent smaller than average for their age. On this particular day, the MSF staff checked 139 children in Garhanga and decided to place 15 of them on therapeutic feeding. Five of them were in such a poor state that they required hospital care. The children placed on MSF feeding programmes are given high-protein flour and other foods such as vegetable oil, beans and grain for themselves and for their families. Poverty makes a bad situation worse “Because the population is already very poor, as soon as drought or locust invasion occurs, the situation quickly turns into a crisis,” said Boureima Alpha Gado, a food security and farming expert at the university of Niamey. Since little or no money could be made from cash crops last year, people in much of Niger are now too poor to pay for healthcare and food. “People are suffering,” said Aliou Sabi Assouman at the Garhanga village dispensary. “Sometimes they come along and when you ask them for the 600 CFA francs (US $1.2) consultation fee they can’t even pay it, let alone afford treatment.” Alpha Gado said Niger’s farmers had become so impoverished over the last decade that they were no longer able to accumulate reserves to cushion against difficulties when they arose. “When there’s a shock such as the locusts, people have no means to face the situation,” he said. “The situation today is actually worsened by the poverty of the farmers, who do not have the means to buy food on the market.” The weekly market at Garhanga is no longer a lively place. The stalls are almost empty, the traders are gloomy and their meagre goods are too expensive for people to afford. A measure of millet now sells for 600 CFA francs (US $1.20), more than double the 250 CFA (50 US cents) charged last October when the harvest was in full swing. “Business is bad,” complained Al Hadji Mohaman Mahamadou, the owner of a hardware stall. “People have no money and when they do have some, all they want to buy is millet.” Livestock prices plunge The mood was no better at the livestock pen, where a few dozen scrawny goats and sheep were failing to attract buyers despite the fact that meat prices have plunged as grain prices have soared. “This big sheep isn’t even worth 20,000 CFA francs today (US $40), it won’t even buy me a bag of millet,” said livestock vendor Ilias Touré. To offset the annual rise in grain prices during the lean season ahead of the new harvest, the government of Niger has set up a joint committee with donors and aid agencies to streamline the management of food crises. This committee manages a potential reserve stock of 110,000 tonnes of grain as well as a special intervention fund. The grain stock and the financial reserve were activated last October when experts warned the government of an impending food crisis. Prime Minister Hama Amadou’s cabinet decided to sell grain at subsidised prices in the areas of greatest need. At the same time, it created grain banks to help village women to manage their food stocks and launched food-for-work schemes for those left penniless by the failure of their crops. But Mayor Malicki said the amount of subsidized food put on sale in Garhanga was woefully insufficient. “Garhanga received 10 tonnes of grain for 6,000 people,” he said. “The bags were gone in a flash. Even people with money were left empty-handed.” Now, he added, the villagers were virtually destitute. “Even if millet were sold very cheaply at five CFA francs (US 1 cent) per kilogramme, some people won’t be able to afford it.” “The state should hand food out free of charge,” the mayor said. Is free food an option? Niger’s opposition parties and some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have criticized the government’s decision to sell subsidised food for the hungry, instead of giving it away for free. Last month up to 2,000 people marched through Niamey to demand free food for the malnourished. But Seidou Bakari, the coordinator of the government's food crisis unit, told IRIN that free handouts were out of the question “because the government simply doesn’t have the resources.” Faced with the prospect of 3.6 million people going hungry, the Niger government has opted to “loan” food to those most at risk of famine, rather than giving it away free, he said. Bakari said there were insufficient supplies of grain on both the domestic and the regional markets because neighbouring countries such as Mali and Chad had also been affected by the food crisis. Some six million people across West Africa's semi-arid Sahel region are facing famine after last year's lethal combination of locusts and drought. Niger alone needed 18.5 billion CFA francs (US $34.2 million) to recapitalise its emergency food stocks and intervention fund, the head of the government’s food crisis unit said. As foreign aid began to arrive this month, government ministers dipped into their own pockets to help the hungry. They urged civil servants to do likewise. Within two weeks, donations by government officials yielded 300 million CFA francs (US $600,000) of cash as well as 22 tonnes of millet and 35 tonnes of wheat flour, Bakari said. The United Nations has appealed to international donors for US $16.2 million to prevent famine in Niger, but Michele Falavigna, who heads the UN Development Fund (UNDP) office in Niamey, said only 25 percent of that sum had been pledged so far. Meanwhile the Islamic world has shown solidarity with staunchly Muslim Niger in a more spontaneous fashion. Libya, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates have all flown in planeloads of food aid. Although emergency assistance is required right now, aid officials and experts say that in the long-term Niger needs to reassess its policies on farming and food security. “Perhaps we have reached the point where traditional systems of production are no longer adequate because of population growth,” Falavigna said. Alpha Gado, the university academic, said the government needed to do more to promote birth control. The average woman in Niger gives birth to eight children during her lifetime, more than her counterparts anywhere else in the world. “In 10 to 15 years there won’t be enough farming land available to feed the population unless a policy on family planning is introduced,” he said.