In the coming months, between 5 and 9 million people risk going hungry in the Sahel
DAKAR (AlertNet) - Aid agencies are concerned about the impact rising insecurity could have on their efforts to respond to a looming food crisis in West Africa's Sahel region, a U.N. official said on Thursday.
In the coming months, between 5 and 9 million people risk going hungry in the Sahel, a semi-arid region just below the Sahara, after erratic rainfall, drought and insect infestations led to poor harvests in several countries including Niger, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal.
At the same time, the Sahel region has experienced an upsurge in violence, with fighting erupting between the Malian army and nomadic Tuareg rebels seeking a sovereign homeland in the Sahara desert, violence in northern Nigeria perpetrated by the Islamist sect Boko Haram, and ongoing operations by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
“We are concerned by what is happening in northern Mali - it is an issue for us - and we are equally concerned about what is happening in northern Nigeria with the activities of Boko Haram," said Kazimiro Rudolf-Jacondo, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in West Africa.
Such security problems could disrupt humanitarian access in the region, he added.
"Limitations to humanitarian access affect our possibility to reach populations that are in need," Rudolf-Jacondo told a news conference in Dakar.
The issue has been raised with senior U.N. officials in the hope of boosting security support to enable aid workers to operate in dangerous places like northern Mali, he added.
NIGERIA THREAT TO FOOD TRADE
An escalation of clashes between Tuareg rebels and the army has driven about 5,000 people from their homes in northern Mali to seek refuge in neighbouring Niger in the past week, according to OCHA.
With most of the refugees settling among host communities in Niger's Ouallam and Tillabery regions, which are among the hardest hit by food shortages in that country, there are fears that a further influx could worsen the hunger situation, an OCHA spokesman in Niger told AlertNet.
The instability in northern Nigeria is also worrying aid agencies, as the growing unrest provoked by Boko Haram's violent attacks there is threatening regional trade.
In the last Sahel hunger crisis in 2009-2010, food was brought into countries like Chad and Niger from Nigeria. But the fact that the Nigerian authorities have partially closed their borders in order to tackle the Boko Haram insurgency could reduce the flow of food, Rudolf-Jacondo said.
The violence in Nigeria is also preventing people in Niger from migrating to northern Nigeria to find work and send remittances back to their families, a common practice when food is short, he said. And some Nigeriens who had already made the trip to northern Nigeria have had to return, he added.
This is heaping more pressure on vulnerable households in Niger after hundreds of thousands of migrants also flooded home from Libya following last year’s uprising there.
“This is definitely reducing the capacity of the communities to cope at a time when those who have come back from Libya, and who used to send remittances back home, have become themselves (recipients) of humanitarian assistance,” Rudolf-Jacondo said.
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