Lives unravelling… Food Security Crisis in Niger 2005
Wednesday, 10 August 2005
Concern's Dominic MacSorley reports from Niger
Its only 28 kilometres from the main town of Tahoua to the village of Barmou but the journey nonetheless takes almost an hour along rough broken roads that are hard going, even when there has been no rain fall. Once you cross through two streams and over the barren, lava stone hills, you dip down into a valley and arrive in Barmou.
Constructed entirely of mud brick the square houses and dome shaped empty grain stores stand in stark contrast to the green fields that surround the village. It’s somehow hard to reconcile hunger in a fertile valley but the promised harvest won’t yield its desperately needed millet crop until October. And even then, there are concerns that yields may be low again.
The Concern nutrition team is making its third visit to Barmou. A week ago they screened 560 children who had arrived at the health centre with their mothers, some having walked all day, more than 20 kilometres, arriving in the village the night before. In the morning, they made an orderly line outside the local health centre and waited for the Concern team and the trucks of food to arrive.
All the children were measured, using the MUAC, a small plastic tape that measures the child’s mid upper arm circumference. It’s a quick way to determine who is malnourished and who isn’t. Later we would weigh and measure the children more accurately , but there were too many to get through , and it was important to get to all the children that day. You couldn’t ask the mothers to come back and some of the children needed immediate treatment.
Of the 560 children that were screened, 242 of the children were malnourished, 32 of them severely. All children were given a bracelet, admitting them to the programme which would over the coming week ensure that the children and the mothers would receive weekly food rations, vitamins, iron tablets. The severely malnourished were given an extra ingredient in their food ration - plumpy nut, the peanut paste that would start to restore these critical children.
Moderate malnutrition is classified by 80% weight for height , when this drops to 70% the child is then severely malnourished and will display the classic signs: muscle and fat wasting , rib cages prominent, sunken eyes, wrinkled skin, apathy , swelling of limbs. If caught in time, the child can recover fully with intensive feeding over a period of a month and a half (15 kgs of plumpy nut/child over the period).
And so as promised, a week later the nutrition team returned. All the children from last week were back again as planned, but so were many more, and as we pulled up to the centre there was a long line of women. Word had got out around the community that Concern was here again and more than 800 mothers had brought their children to the centre, some of them from the week before, many of them for the first time. It was overwhelming and another long day of waiting lay ahead for the mothers, another long day of weighing, measuring , treating and handing out food rations for the Concern team.
But hunger is not new in this region and food security is an annual problem in Niger, the second poorest country in the world. Drought, followed by a plaque of locusts severely affected last year’s harvest. Countrywide the deficit was around 7% or 230,000 Metric Tonnes, but in specific regions such as Tahoua, where Concern is working, the harvest was down by 26%. People go hungry every year, but the poor harvest in 2004 meant that they ran out of food stocks much earlier than usual and by February of this year, the situation started to deteriorate.
Albaraka, is a village of 2,000 people and is a further 7 kilometres beyond Barman. Women from the village have been attending the Concern nutrition centre. In almost every household at least one child has died, from hunger, malaria, meningitis, diarrhoea - the nearest water source is 7 kilometres away but even this isn’t that clean. It is red from the colour of the soil and the women have had to strain it through cloth to make it more drinkable, but they knew it was making their children sick. One 40 year old woman, Musana has lost 4 of her 7 children. Her only income was from the baskets that her blind husband wove. Albaraka once had over 2000 goats but now only 300 remained, most have died or had been sold. The price of goats dropped and you had to sell five to get one sack of grain. Almost all the able bodied men have gone to Senegal, Libya, Nigeria for work. In the past year, 500 have left and the money they were sending back was the only income in the village. For the poorest in the village, the hungry season means that they can only eat one meal a day or even once every two days - which consists of millet porridge, a thin soup of grain mixed with milk or water - a very impoverished diet…..and not enough to remain healthy.
In a country where 60 % of the population live on less than a dollar a day, there is not much to fall back on when times are hard. Increasingly the poorest have been forced to sell off whatever possessions they own, a cow, a goat, farming tools, anything to be able to buy enough food. As the market floods with livestock, so the prices drop - last year you could get $15 for a female goat, then it was $10 and today the prices have in some areas have fallen as low as $4. And then when there is nothing left to sell, families do what they have been avoiding at all costs, they sell their land. Something that has been rare in the past, but is now on the increase despite the fact that again prices are dropping and a typical land holding will now only earn about $120. It’s a desperate measure that they know will ultimately push them deeper and deeper into impoverishment.
The drought, locusts and poor harvest have contributed greatly to the current food security crisis where 2.6 million are classified as severely hungry and 800,000 children are affected by malnutrition.
Severe malnutrition is estimated between 2.4 and 2.9% in the most severely affected areas with rates similar to those of the worst conflict zones. It is estimated that as many as 150,000 children under 5-years old are affected by severe malnutrition among an estimated 800,000 malnourished children nation-wide.
But chronic poverty is the main killer in this the second poorest country in the world. In any given year one in four children die before the age of five from a combination of hunger, sickness, disease, lack of basic health care and lack of clean drinking water. In the short term Concern’s emergency intervention will save and sustain the most vulnerable until the next harvest. However if the population is ever to break out of the annual cycle of hunger then Niger will require concerted investment by international donors to tackle the root causes of poverty. And Niger is only one of many countries across Africa that is experiencing food security problems. Today 18 million people across this continent are hungry, some dangerously so. This is what the Live 8 concert was all about, this is why Concern believes that the 189 governments that signed up to cutting global poverty in half by 2015 now need to live up to that promise. There are no more excuses.
Dominic MacSorley, Acting Country Director, Niger.
