World Watch: Poor strategy in food aid to Niger
Nearly nine months have passed since the United Nations and several international relief organizations sounded the alarm about a looming famine in Niger, but only in the past few weeks have substantial food rations and aid started to pour into the country.
Recent images in the media of starving children have helped raise awareness, but some aid workers say the help, though now critical, could have prevented the crisis if it had arrived earlier.
The famine, following a severe drought that destroyed this year's harvest and a massive locust infestation, is the worst to hit the landlocked nation in central Africa in over a decade. Malnutrition and disease in Niger, the world's second-poorest country, typically claim 1 in 5 children before they reach the age of 5. The current famine has put roughly 3.5 million people, or one third of the country's population, at risk, the United Nations says. Of that figure, about 192,000 are severely or moderately malnourished children.
In the past two weeks, pledges and contributions to the United Nations have increased rapidly. Last week, the United Nations increased its appeal for aid money to $81 million, fives times the amount requested in May. (So far, roughly $26 million has been contributed.) Aid workers say the crisis is worsening now during the country's traditional "hunger gap," the period between planting and the harvest, and may get worse before it improves.
Aid was slow to arrive partially because the situation in Niger developed as relief agencies were focused primarily on Southeast Asia after last December's tsunami. More recently, the Darfur conflict in Sudan has received much of the attention.
But aid organizations and some donor countries have been at odds about the best way to help Niger since the original warnings. Some critics of the relief effort say early efforts were misguided: Instead of calling for food rations, say critics like the London-based Overseas Development Institute, the groups called only for monetary donations to subsidize food prices, which had started to skyrocket.
"It's a little more complex than to say the world didn't pay attention," says Nicolas de Torrente, executive director of Doctors Without Borders, an international organization that has treated about 15,000 children in Niger. "It's true that they didn't look at this as an emergency, but it's also...the strategy pursued—they didn't propose emergency measures that would have been adequate."
Such measures could have included free food distribution, he said.
"You need to prevent people from becoming malnourished," he said. "That's what really hasn't happened until now."
The State Department has called the situation in Niger "a very severe, but localized, food security crisis" and has disputed the number of people, 3.5 million, that the United Nations says is at risk. Ed Fox, an assistant administrator for USAID, said on Friday that according to U.S. estimates there are 800,000 people in need of food assistance and possibly 2 million whom the crisis affects. He also said the famine is a result primarily of chronic poverty in the country, not just the immediate drought and swarm of locusts.
"Shipping massive amounts of food over there is not the answer to this problem because they are in cyclical period where they are very vulnerable," he said, according to Agence France Presse. "If we sent massive amounts of food aid over there, the harvest will come in next month and the prices will drop through the floor and it'll destroy their economy." The United States has contributed about $14 million in humanitarian aid to Niger.
Marc Cohen, a fellow at the International Food Policy Research Center, a Washington-based nonprofit, said the situation in Niger is symptomatic of his theory that emergency assistance procedure is "somewhat broken."
"The way it has been done, an emergency happens, an appeal from the government or through the U.N.," he said. "Then donors, rich countries, or international agencies respond to that. Sometimes it takes a very long time for there to be an adequate response. It may take several appeals." Instead, countries should focus on building up regional stockpiles of food, Cohen says.