Fingers pointed as emergency aid reaches Niger

As the first shipments of emergency aid reached feeding centres in hunger-struck Niger, accusations are mounting that economic policies imposed on the country from outside had contributed to the food shortages now affecting up to 3 million people.

Some aid experts blamed the International Monetary Fund and European Union whose economic programmes have contributed to sharp increases in the prices of staples such as sorghum and millet.

Others said the Niamey government had downplayed the emergency to protect local food traders who are resistant to free aid because it undermines markets.

"Rock concerts are all very well," said one of the more outspoken aid experts, the former French socialist health minister Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) who visited the disaster area last week.

"But while the bands were playing people were already dying in Niger because there is never enough planning."

The United Nations has more than doubled the number of people it plans to feed in Niger as dwindling food supplies in villages push more people close to the brink of starvation.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) now aims to provide emergency rations to 2.5 million people compared with the 1.2 million it said it aimed to help last week, reflecting a major increase in the scale of its response.

Relief workers treating children dying from hunger after drought and locusts wiped out last year's harvest say the United Nations, the government and other agencies should have started such large-scale emergency food aid much earlier.

UN officials said early in July they would start the current type of emergency food distribution only as a last resort, fearing that acting prematurely could upset local food markets and encourage a damaging dependency on aid.

Two WFP airlifts of emergency food supplies this weekend were due to deliver enough high-energy biscuits to feed 100,000 people while they wait for full rations to arrive.

The UN agency also plans to airlift 186 tonnes of corn soya blend from Ivory Coast's main city Abidjan next week.

In normal years in Niger the UN distributes much of its aid by feeding participants in "food-for-work" schemes to improve farm infrastructure or provide school meals for children attending class, to promote long-term development.

Now that full-blown emergency aid is under way, it will be used to help people survive until the October harvest, particularly those who have exhausted what food stocks they could save from last year's meagre crop.

Clearly deeply moved after a three-day trip to the Sahara region that ended yesterday, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy denounced the "sick avarice of rich countries, the lack of prevention and vision from the international community".

For climatic and demographic reasons, Niger - a vast former French colony in the Sahara which is the world's third uranium producer - has one of the most fragile economies in the world.

The Muslim country, situated north of Nigeria, has a population of about 11 million - many of them nomadic herders - and one of the highest birth rates in the world.

According to Johanne Sekkenes, mission head of MSF - which is carrying out the biggest emergency exercise in its history in Niger - the current emergency could have been avoided.

"This is not a famine, in the Somalian way. The harvest was bad in 2004 and the millet granaries are empty. Yet there is food on the markets. The trouble is the prices of the food are beyond anyone's reach.

"Given this situation, it was criminal of the UN, earlier this year, to tackle the emergency in a gingerly way, putting 'moderately-priced' cereals on the market. The UN should have immediately organised free food distribution."

Ms Sekkenes added that the International Monetary Fund and the European Union had pressed Niger too hard to implement a structural adjustment programme.

"No sooner had the government been re-elected [earlier this year] than it was obliged to introduce 19 per cent VAT on basic food stuffs. At the same time, as part of the policy, emergency grain reserves were abolished."

According to international agencies, the price of basic foodstuffs has risen between 75 and 89 per cent in the past five years.

At the same time, the sale price of livestock - the main income source of the country's nomadic herders - has fallen by about 25 per cent.

Even though the food emergency in Niger has been pending since last autumn when rains ended early and the towns of Agadez, Maradi, Zinder and Tahoua were hit by successive invasions of locusts that devoured crops, it took until last week for aid shipments to begin in earnest.

Last autumn a first call for funds for Niger by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) met with no pledges. On 8 July, hoping to capitalise on the African focus of the G8 summit at Gleneagles, the WFP renewed its call. But of the $30 million it request, donors only came up with one third.

Forty-four tons of high energy biscuits sent by the World Food Programme arrived by air at the weekend.

France also pledged a 4.6m euro increase in its food aid to Niger. Mr Kouchner said his charity, Reunir, had taken in more than 64 tonnes of food aid in the past three weeks.

- THE INDEPENDENT