Aid groups say region especially vulnerable due to the recentness of the 2009-2010 hunger emergency there
DAKAR (AlertNet) – Aid groups are alerting the world that millions of people are likely to face severe food shortages next year in West Africa’s Sahel, saying the region is especially vulnerable due to the recentness of the 2009-2010 hunger emergency there.
What is different this time compared to the 2009-2010 crisis?
*Frequency of crises:
The gap between the previous food crisis (2009-2010) and the imminent emergency is very short – barely two years. Families that lost their means of livelihoods (crops, livestock) in the last crisis are barely recovering and are hit again, experts say.
"These consecutive crises are like a boxer who has been hit and he goes down and he gets up and is hit again without a chance to recover his senses," said Paul Sitnam, the West Africa emergency coordinator for World Vision, a Christian relief organisation.
"People have one disaster and before they recover they are hit with another so they go down, down the vulnerability and poverty scale and they don't have the time like before to be resilient and resist the next disaster," he told AlertNet in Dakar.
Although the arid Sahel region that runs south of the Sahara desert is prone to droughts and food shortages, a period of five to ten years used to separate major crises, giving people time to fully recover. The 2009-2010 hunger crisis came five years after the 2004-2005 one.
“That is why we think that it is important to intervene immediately to avoid the situation deteriorating,” said Thomas Yanga, regional director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in West and Central Africa.
*Government reaction
This year the governments of the region have been proactive and open about the hunger challenges they are facing unlike in the past when they considered hunger a cause for shame, aid workers have said.
“We’ve received good cooperation from all the governments in designing response plans,” Yanga told a news conference in Dakar on Thursday.
Barely two years ago, few aid officials used to agree that their names or organisations be cited when they expressed concerns to the media about the deteriorating hunger situation in Niger, until a Feb 2010 military coup toppled Mamadou Tandja as the country’s leader. The aid groups had been afraid of incurring the wrath of the authorities.
This year Niger, through President Mahamadou Issoufou, was the first country to announce that they were facing a cereal-production shortfall and that they needed international help. The authorities have been working with the U.N. and international aid agencies to respond to the crisis. The U.N. Central Emergency Fund (CERF) this week allocated $6 million to jump-start response by the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the WFP in Niger.
Mauritania, another country severely hit by drought and cereal shortfalls, plans to launch a $235-million emergency response programme at the start of next year to help people who have lost their food and livestock and has appealed for international assistance, a U.N. report said.
Burkina Faso has decided to collect 50,000-60,000 tonnes of cereal from areas where there are surpluses to sell at subsidised rates in parts of the country where there have been cereal shortfalls, while Mali has set up a $160 million programme to fund the subsidised sale and free distribution of food, seeds and farming implements in areas where there have been shortfalls, according to the U.N. report.
Although EU Humanitarian Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva warned this week some countries were trying to 'wish the crisis away,' regional analysts say there is a marked improvement from the past.
"I have seen some really good documentation coming out of the governments with their assessments, their thoughts, what their plans are, and they just need the resources to put these plans into effect," said Sitnam.
"The calls for preparations and needs assessments started back in October which means we (aid agencies and governments) have learnt our lessons from last year and 2005," he added.
*Regional and global context
At the time of the 2009-2010 food shortages in the Sahel, there were food production surpluses in many coastal countries in West Africa which served as a buffer.
This enabled WFP and other agencies responding to the crisis to purchase food at cheaper rates from neighbouring countries including Benin, Ghana and Nigeria for their activities. It also offered aid agencies an opportunity to use schemes such as cash distributions in places where markets were functional in the drought-hit Sahel countries.
This year the surpluses in coastal countries are relatively limited, the WFP said.
Moreover, with several donor countries in economic turmoil and international attention focused on the far more dramatic Horn of Africa hunger crisis – which might last until the summer of next year – the Sahel might struggle to get help as quickly as expected, experts say.
"It will be a difficult choice for donors but we hope that we would get help," Yanga said.
See also: UN sounds alarm over growing hunger in the Sahel
(Editing by Rebekah Curtis)
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