President Mahamadou Issoufou calls on the international community for aid, saying Niger is set to face a cereal deficit of 400,000 tonnes
DAKAR (AlertNet) - Niger is at the cusp of another food crisis as erratic rains and insect attacks on crops have caused crop failure in several parts of the West African nation, authorities have warned.
President Mahamadou Issoufou has called on the international community to come to his country’s assistance, saying Niger is set to face a cereal deficit of 400,000 tonnes.
A major international intervention was required last year when half of Niger’s 15 million inhabitants experienced food shortages and severe nutritional problems after poor rainfall led to bad 2009 harvests.
“We are all very concerned about the food security situation in Niger,” Denise Brown, head of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) in Niger, told AlertNet.
“I visited farms in the Tillabery region where the crops were completely decimated and there was nothing to harvest,” she said on the phone from Niamey, Niger’s capital.
Following early warning reports from government agencies, Nigerien authorities and aid groups operating in the country have started taking steps to respond to the expected shortages and hope for donor support, Brown said.
The WFP plans to launch schemes in which members of vulnerable communities are given food in exchange for work on vital new infrastructure or for time spent learning new skills that will increase the food security of households or communities (food-for-work), she said.
“Our plan is to intervene early enough before the lean season to avert a humanitarian crisis,” Brown added.
Aid groups say people would find it hard to cope with another crisis as they are barely recovering from 2009/2010 food shortages. In addition, many Nigerien migrants in Libya, who used to send remittances to their families at the height of food shortages, have returned and are jobless due to unrest in North Africa.
Niger, located in West Africa’s arid Sahel region that runs south of the Sahara desert, is one of the poorest countries in the world. It depends on rain-fed agriculture for its food needs and has a history of food shortages and nutrition crises.
Experts say shifts in weather patterns related to climate change would mean regular droughts leading to bad harvests as well as unexpected but heavy rainfall that would also wash away crops.
“We need to develop alternative agricultural systems that do not depend exclusively on rainfall else with the impacts of climate change Niger will be permanently in a food crisis,” said Moussa Tchangari, head of Alternative Espace Citoyen, a Nigerien civil society group.
Authorities must support farmers to develop an irrigation-based system of agriculture that takes advantage of the River Niger that meanders through the country, thus abandoning the over-dependence on rain, Tchangari said on the phone from Niamey.
President Issoufou said at a Niger River Basin conference this week that his country will pursue irrigation as a means for a long-term solution to the recurrent food shortages related to drought. Earlier this year he had announced an emergency irrigation programme worth 10 billion FCFA, covering more than 86,000 hectares of land.
However, Tchangari urged the Nigerien government to also support agricultural research, as well as intensive production through the use of fertilisers as steps to boost food production in the country.
“Researchers could develop drought-resistant crop varieties of our staple cereals that do not require much water,” he said.
“And if the state subsidises fertilisers our poor farmers could have access to improve yields and we would depend less on food imports and food aid whether there is a drought or not.”
(Additional reporting in Niger by Abdoulaye Massalatchi; editing by Rebekah Curtis)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
