World News

Economist.com: Hunger in AfricaFamines are becoming more frequent in the Sahel

Posted by: Berhane.Habtemariam59@web.de

Date: Friday, 26 October 2018

TAKING OFF her veil, Fatou (not her real name) begins to wrap her dead child in cloth. It does not take much. The toddler is half the size she should be. But Fatou cannot tie the final knot. Her mouth opens and then closes. Slowly she straightens her back and walks out of the room.

 

The main hospital in Zinder, a southern region of Niger, treats hundreds of starving children every week. Rehydration and peanut paste save most of those who make it here. But some are too far gone to help.

The Sahel, the arid region that borders the southern fringe of the Sahara, is hungry. This year 6m people are unable to feed themselves without help in Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and Senegal, says the World Food Programme.

In 2005 drought devastated crops, leaving 3.6m people needing food aid in Niger alone. It struck again in 2012, prompting aid workers to feed 8m people in the Sahel. Two years later 6.3m people needed help. This year is scarcely any better.

Over the past few months, as in previous crises, charities have helped to avert mass starvation by delivering food and setting up specialist clinics to treat starving children. The number of clinics has jumped to about 8,000 from 1,110 in 2008.

Abdou Dieng, the director of the World Food Programme in west and central Africa, argues that the Sahel is stuck in a cycle of hunger. “We’re just a plaster on a gushing wound,” says a worker for ECHO, the European Union’s aid service.

Underlying the bouts of hunger are a changing climate, increases in conflict and unproductive farming. Start with the changing weather. Although the Sahel is not much drier on average than it used to be, its rainfall is becoming more erratic, says Alex Orenstein of Action Against Hunger: “It floods for a week, destroys crops and grassland, then dries out for a month.”

At the same time, the Sahara is advancing. Natalie Thomas and Sumant Nigam from the University of Maryland say that from 1920 to 2013 the desert expanded by about 10%. Water sources are drying out, driving nomadic herders farther south in search of grazing and water. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than at the once vast Lake Chad, which has lost 90% of its surface area over the past century.

The region’s farmers and herders are particularly vulnerable to the effects of drought because there are few dams or irrigation systems. In Niger, for instance, just 0.2% of agricultural land is irrigated. Population growth of about 3% a year adds further pressure. If productivity (agricultural or otherwise) were advancing more quickly, the Sahel would have no difficulty feeding itself. But food production—never mind the wider economy—is not keeping up with the baby boom.

There are some obvious remedies. The first would be to invest in sprinklers, cisterns and pumps. The World Bank reckons that roughly 20% of the region’s irrigation potential has been developed. Another idea would be for governments and aid agencies to fund research into new seeds and farming techniques to improve yields and make crops less vulnerable to drought.

Instead, governments are reducing the share of spending they devote to agriculture, perhaps because city-dwellers complain more loudly when their roads have potholes or their hospitals run out of medicine. This is a missed opportunity since many countries in the region depend heavily on agriculture.

Farming and fishing in Niger still generate about 36% of GDP—a share that has barely changed since 1990—and provide 75% of jobs. Moreover some 85% of Niger’s people live in the countryside, much the same proportion as in 1990. Over the same period the government budget allocation to agriculture has fallen by 10 percentage points, to 8% of the total. Similar trends are evident across the region, even if they are less stark. Yet improving farm productivity offers higher returns than many other sorts of public investment, according to the World Bank. And unless the region’s rural resilience improves, many of the mothers tending their babies in Zinder will be back at the clinic in a year or two.

This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the headline "The forever famine"

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