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Livestock farmers face hunger season in the Sahel
As a major food crisis looms over the Sahel, threatening 2.6 million children with acute malnutrition by spring, livestock farmers across the region are already feeling the impact of the hunger season, which this year, has arrived early.
In Mauritania the number of families facing food insecurity has tripled in the past year and nomads and livestock farmers are the worst affected. New conflict in Tuareg, northern Mali, is exacerbating the situation, with thousands of families fleeing their homes.
The hunger season - when crop supplies and pasture are exhausted in between harvests - comes to the Sahel every year. For crop farmers it is usually between June and September, and for livestock farmers, who account for 20% of the population in the Sahel, it occurs between April and June. Families tend to adopt coping methods to get themselves through the season, such as reducing their daily meals, or migrating to areas of better pasture.
However, a lack of rainfall this year has advanced and elongated the season of hunger, which along with the ongoing struggle of families to recover from the food crisis of 2010, will exhaust their coping mechanisms, trapping them in a downward spiral of poverty. For crop farmers the full impact of the hunger gap will be felt between March and October, whilst for livestock farmers, the hunger season has already begun and is set to last for several months.
Farming families living on the edge
“The deficit of pasture this year has meant that livestock farmers have had to move south earlier than usual, concentrating along the banks of Senegal and Niger rivers, where conflict is increasing in competition for scarce pasture and the increasing threat of resources being exhausted,” explains Frederic Ham, responsible for disaster prevention for Action Against Hunger in the Sahel.
“The lack of rains this year has caused overgrazing of land and this has forced many livestock farming families to sell their animals prematurely, before they are so weak they die, to be able to buy food (at very high prices in the markets). This has caused an imbalance between supply and demand of animals in the markets – there are too many to sell and so cattle prices have plummeted, reducing the purchasing power of livestock farmers,” explains Action Against Hunger’s Head of Food Security, Julien Jacob. “A year ago families could obtain, for example, 100 kilos of millet for the price of a goat, but the value has now decreased by 40%.”
Action Against Hunger teams are responding to the impact of the crisis on livestock herders and their families, with food security programmes including the distribution of cattle feed, animal health and organising money transfers to farming families.
Conflict in Mali: a new threat
Since mid-January, fresh conflict in Tuareg, in northern Mali, has caused tens of thousands of people to flee their homes to southern Mali or over the border into neighbouring Niger and Mauritania.
“These movements, along with the obstacles they pose to the access of humanitarian aid, will make the situation even worse for the most vulnerable families,” said Rafael de Prado, Action Against Hunger’s desk officer for the Sahel.
Action Against Hunger is already implementing programmes to assist vulnerable families and to improve food security, including the distribution of food rations and the development of cash for work programmes, in six of the countries affected by crisis - Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Chad and Senegal.
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