Via The Globe and Mail, a report by Geoffrey York: Drought in West Africa threatens millions. Excerpt:
After thousands died needlessly because of the slow response to the Somalia famine last year, the world’s donor nations now face another crisis: a drought in West Africa where up to 500,000 are on the brink of starvation.
Failed harvests and lack of rain are affecting millions of people in the Sahel region of eight countries in West Africa. The crisis is made worse by rising food prices and the return of 200,000 migrant workers to West Africa because of the civil wars in Libya and Ivory Coast.
Now the question is whether the world’s wealthy nations will respond in time – or whether they will repeat the disaster of the Somalia famine, when early warnings were ignored for nearly a year before massive aid was finally sent.
Among the countries suffering from the Sahel drought are Niger, Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Chad, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. It’s a vast, sprawling, arid region, with villages often in remote and inaccessible places, making it difficult to distribute food to them.
Unlike Somalia, the Sahel is not in the grip of war, and it is not controlled by a militant anti-Western group like al-Shabab, which has blocked aid from reaching much of Somalia. But there are security concerns in some parts of the Sahel, including Mali, where rebels roam the north, and Nigeria, where terrorist attacks have ravaged many districts.
The United Nations children’s agency, Unicef, says it needs $100-million this year to save the lives of 500,000 children in the Sahel. It wants to provide food to a million people in the region, and so far it only has the resources to feed half of them.
“We’re buying food as quickly as we can,” said David Gressly, the regional director of Unicef in West Africa. “Everyone has learned a lesson from the Horn of Africa famine. We’re acting much more quickly this time. We’re going to react in time and save a large number of lives.”
The latest Unicef surveys have forecast that more than a million children will suffer acute malnutrition in the Sahel crisis. As many as 60 per cent of malnourished children can die in a food crisis, but the death rate in the Sahel could be higher than usual because the region has still not recovered from a serious drought in 2010.
Climate change is believed to be one of the reasons for the rising number of food crises in the Sahel, but high fertility rates and rising populations are contributing to the problem by putting huge pressure on the Sahel’s arid farmland, which can’t support many people.
