Food aid is beginning to arrive in the famine-stricken areas of Niger but in inadequate amounts and not always in the form that starving families need.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) and various non-governmental organizations said Monday they had started distributing supplies sent by the WFP. Free food was being distributed Monday in several villages in the Tahoua region in one of a number of targeted operations. But the process is painfully slow: it takes several days to truck the supplies to the NGOs' depots and from there out to the villages. In Barmou, the British NGO Concern handed out rations of high-energy protein-enriched biscuits and bags of enriched flour to 180 mothers of "moderately" malnourished children.
But many mothers left empty-handed because aid groups have only received food for children judged to be "moderately at risk."
Supplies of food for families that can number eight people have not arrived from the WFP.
The program was continuing Monday to send out truckloads of emergency food aid flown into Niamey at the end of last week, including 70 tonnes of protein-fortified biscuits.
Over the next few days it plans to distribute to NGOs working in the vast northwest African country more than 4,000 tonnes of food destined for the areas hardest hit by the famine, including 2,000 tonnes of rice and 500 tonnes of pulses.
By the end of September it plans to have sent 23,000 tonnes of food aid to the 1.6 million people judged to be especially vulnerable. Among the NGOs responsible for food distribution are Concern, Islamic Help, Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), Save the Children and the International Federation of Red Cross societies. Drought and a plague of locusts which ravaged crops and grazing land in Niger left the country short of 224,000 tonnes of cereals, or 10 percent of the total, last year. But in some villages production fell by half. The area around Tahoua is one where hunger is particularly acute, together with the region of Tillabery, north of Niamey, and the districts of Maradi and Zinder in the south. Near Keita,, the Spanish humanitarian organization ACF-Spain was due to distribute yesterday rations of enriched flour to "moderately malnourished" children. In the coming days it hopes to extend its operations to include whole families in 19 villages in the region.
"This is an emergency," said ACF director general Benoit Miribel. "We have to act fast. Once again, it is the poorest and the most dependent who are the most vulnerable, those who have no more money, who are selling their possessions."
There are no official figures for the number of dead. The UN reckons that 3.5 million of Niger's 12 million inhabitants are theatened by famine.
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