Infants die of hunger in Niger as world watches-MSF

Infants die of hunger in Niger as world watches-MSF 28 Jun 2005 18:51:20 GMT Source: Reuters

(Adds U.N. to up aid, debate on free food, paragraphs 6-10)

By Matthew Green

NIAMEY, June 28 (Reuters) - Thousands of children could soon starve to death in Niger unless rich countries send emergency food aid to tackle a crisis worsened by decades of outside neglect, a medical charity said on Tuesday.

As Britain prepares to put African poverty top of the agenda at a summit for the Group of Eight industrialised nations next week, parents in Niger are burying infants who died because they are too poor to feed them.

"Children are dying from hunger today," said Johanne Sekkenes, head of mission for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Niger, a West African state on the Sahara's southern fringe.

"The problem is that nobody cares," she told Reuters. "The big donors accept this unacceptable situation in Niger."

Ranked as the world's second poorest state according to U.N. statistics, Niger is a vast, mainly desert country where the majority of the 12 million inhabitants survive on what they can grow or herd with the little rain that falls.

Even in good years, more than a million people routinely suffer food shortages, but drought has pushed that number to about 3.6 million in 2005, according to aid workers.

"It is a very serious situation which deserves action, and right now, not tomorrow," said Gian Carlo Cirri, representative of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) in Niamey. "We are trying to more than double our coverage."

Cirri said WFP aims to raise the number of people it provides with food to more than 800,000 from 365,000 it normally assists each year.

"POOREST MUST PAY"

The U.N. body provides some free food to the most severely malnourished children and their families, but says it uses free distribution as a last resort to avoid encouraging a dependency syndrome, in line with Niger's national policy.

But MSF says the government and donors should immediately provide free food and healthcare for a far bigger proportion of the most needy people, scattered across a semi-arid belt stretching across the south of the country.

"The poorest people in the world have to pay for their food and they have to pay for their healthcare," Sekkenes said. "They need free food distribution now."

Niger's government has offered to loan basic staples such as millet and beans to families, who then repay it after the next harvest, and subsidises some food for sale below market prices.

Sekkenes said about 250 severely malnourished children were being admitted each week to a feeding centre run by MSF in the southern town of Maradi in March, more than three times the number the previous year.

Drought and swarms of locusts that ravaged crops last year have focused outside attention on Niger, lifting the lid on what aid workers are calling a "chronic emergency".

Sekkenes said the former French colony, which apart from uranium has precious few resources, had simply failed to attract the kind of sustained agricultural aid necessary to drag itself out of a permanent hand-to-mouth existence.