'Thousands may die in Niger'
2005-08-08 13:49
Maradi - Thousands of tons of international food aid are needed for Niger within the next few weeks if tens of thousands of people are to be saved from starvation, warn humanitarian groups.
They said the aid that had been dispatched since the world woke up to the situation last month, in the wake of plagues of locusts and drought in 2004, was far from adequate.
Gerome Gasneir of a Spanish branch of Action Against Hunger said: "If international aid does not arrive quickly, something really serious could happen."
He said that the agency's treatment centres were receiving two to three times more cases of malnutrition than two weeks ago.
'Niger situation could be worse'
Gian Carlo Cirri, the representative of the UN's World Food Programme in Niamey, Niger, said, "We have six to eight weeks to distribute food to 2.5 million people.
"If they are not helped by then, the situation could be much worse than it is today."
Cirri estimated that 23 000 tons of food would be needed in the stricken areas of the country by September, deploring the fact that so far only a third of its aid programme had been funded.
Johannes Sekkeles, head of the mission of the medical charity, Medecins sans Frontieres in Niger, also warned that the next two months would be the worst time for the food crisis.
A representative of Niger's ministry of agriculture said: "The next harvests will not take place before the end of September and we don't know if they will be good."
32 000 kids suffer from malnutrition
The figure of 2.5 million was the United Nations estimate of the number suffering from food shortages out of a population of 12 million, of whom 32 000 were children suffering from severe malnutrition who faced death without the necessary food and medical treatment.
The UN on Friday raised fivefold to $80m estimated of the money needed to tackle a "deteriorating" situation with both food and sanitation as well as an "increasing" mortality toll.
The UN said so far only $25m had been donated, though also on Friday the World Bank extended more than $120m for emergency food aid.
The bank's country manager for Niger, Vincent Turbat, said: "There are pockets now where people have no more food and they need to be helped until the next harvest, about mid-September."
Emergency medical feeding centre
UN co-ordinator for Niger, Michele Falavigna, made "an anguished and urgent appeal to the world to save lives," the day after UN Children's Fund deputy director general, Rima Salah, said after visiting an emergency medical feeding centre here that "it is not too late to save many more children".
She said: "When you see a child dying in front of your eyes, that means the food supply and malnutrition situation in the country is very serious."
However the United States had disputed the UN estimates of the numbers in need of food assistance and suggested the figure could be a third of that.