More help needed as Africa's Sahel enters hunger season

DAKAR (AlertNet) - Hunger, a critical issue for 10 million people living in West Africa's Sahel, will worsen without urgent funds as the region enters a traditionally fragile period before the next harvest, the World Food Programme said on Friday.


The U.N. food agency sounded the alarm as the Sahel region entered the "hunger season" -- an annually recurring period when supplies of food have dwindled, little is available to buy at the market and prices rise.

Aid workers fear the onset of the lean season will compound the hunger crisis in the drought-stricken Sahel region, south of the Sahara desert, before the next harvest is due in September.

"The Sahel is one of the most destitute regions in the world and the spectre of hunger is pushing increasing numbers of people from the countryside and into cities where they are searching for food to feed their families," Thomas Yanga, WFP's regional director for West Africa, said in a statement.

"People have lost crops, livestock, and the ability to cope on their own, and the levels of malnutrition among women and children have already risen to very high levels," he added.

WFP plans to step up operations to assist 3.6 million people in four countries in the region -- Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Mali -- that have been severely hit by food shortages and malnutrition.

It already launched an operation to assist more than 700,000 people in Chad's western and central regions. It has also started emergency feeding operations for about 340,000 people in Cameroon's north and 258,000 people in the northeast of Mali.

However, there has been slow donor response to the developing emergency.

POOR FUNDING

WFP still needs $125 million to scale up its response in Niger alone, where half the population is facing food shortages or are unable to buy food, while the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) warned this week that its relief operations in Chad were being jeopardised by a lack of cash.

In Chad, some non-governmental organisations including Oxfam have received funds from the European Union's humanitarian aid and civil protection department (ECHO) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) but this remains insufficient, an Oxfam official said.

"We decided to work in about three zones of the country where there are no relief groups but at the moment we have not been able to deploy due to lack of funds," said Abakar Mahamat Ahmat, the head of Oxfam Intermon in Chad, told AlertNet.

The U.N. emergency relief coordinator, John Holmes, visited Chad this week after visiting Niger at the end of April, in an effort to draw international attention to the plight of those hardest hit by the drought.

He said it was crucial that this crisis did not turn into a catastrophe.

"We need to get more funds and more actors on the ground, NGOs and others to try to deal with this problem so that it doesn't get bigger than it is now," Holmes said in reference to the food and nutrition problems in Chad where two million people are threatened by hunger.

He said the conditions across the Sahel were similar with farmers and herders struck by the same climate change, over-population and agricultural problems.

"We have to deal with water management, better drilling, more reservoirs, and more investment in agriculture that would give allowance to survive these droughts that will continue," he told AlertNet

Written by: George Fominyen