Between five and nine million people in the Sahel, a semi-arid region just below the Sahara, risk going hungry in the coming months
LONDON (AlertNet) - The plight of children with acute malnutrition in the Sahel is as “heartbreaking” as in the Horn of Africa, the European Union’s top aid official has warned following a trip to the region where millions face a hunger crisis.
“We are indeed facing a dramatically worsening situation in the Sahel,” European Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva told AlertNet. “We are facing a race against time to get help to people.”
Most of the attention has been on Niger, but Georgieva feared Chad could be even worse affected because it is less well prepared and recent price hikes – 50 percent in some places - are having a bigger impact.
Between five and nine million people in the Sahel, a semi-arid region just below the Sahara, risk going hungry in the coming months. Many have not yet recovered from the last food crisis two years ago.
Poor rains, failed crops, the return of migrant workers from Libya and instability in neighbouring northern Nigeria are among the factors pushing food prices up in Niger and Chad, Georgieva said.
“Everywhere we went people were telling me, ‘we are very worried’. Some would say, ‘we have not yet recovered from 2010’. And everywhere people would say, ‘we need help to get through the year’,” the commissioner added.
In one place in Chad people told her the harvest was just five percent of what they had last year.
The commissioner said Niger, which she also visited, was better prepared for the emergency than Chad thanks to its early warning system which had already predicted a problem last year.
One factor exacerbating the situation is the return of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Libya following last year’s uprising. People who used to support large families with the wages they sent home are now back and competing for scarce food, she said.
Another complication is the violence in northern Nigeria. In the last Sahel hunger crisis, food was brought in from Nigeria and Ghana, but the growing unrest is threatening regional trade.
LIFE-LONG EFFECTS
Georgieva said she was particularly concerned for some 1.7 million children under five who are at risk in the Sahel.
The awful affects of malnutrition were brought home to her, she said, when she visited a hospital in the western Chadian city of Mao where the silence on the children’s ward was “chilling”.
Babies the same age as her own 18-month-old granddaughter were just half the weight, Georgieva said.
But the children in the clinic are the lucky ones, she added. A third of those who need treatment in Chad do not get help.
Georgieva said the commission had recently doubled its emergency aid for the Sahel to over 100 million euros ($131 million), which among other things would save 250,000 children from death or lifelong disability.
“If a child under two doesn’t get nutrition, their brain is impacted for life,” she said.
The commissioner called on other donors and agencies to step up help and stressed early intervention would save tax payers money. Treating acute malnutrition in a child costs 100 euros or more, she said, compared to 20 euros to prevent it.
Georgieva said child malnutrition in Chad was exacerbated by the shockingly low level of breastfeeding. Many mothers replace milk with water and also throw away the thick nutritious milk which first appears after birth, believing it to be bad.
Just three percent of mothers at the clinic she visited breastfed for the recommended six months. Many were in their early teens and had no access to healthcare or information, she said.
“We need to be much more insistent with both governments (Niger and Chad) on the criticality of health systems and healthcare, especially for children under five,” the commissioner added.
Georgieva said her trip had also dramatically underscored the impact of climate change in the region – one main road she saw had become a “canyon in the desert”.
She warned that rainfalls had become increasingly erratic and the region often received very short, very strong rains which lasted just days instead of longer, more moderate rains.
The impact on farming was devastating and bad harvests were occurring increasingly frequently in the Sahel, the commissioner said.
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