Aid requested as 10 million face hunger in West Africa

From IRIN, another appeal for money and aid to help combat the famine in West Africa.

Several UN agencies and NGOs are calling for a greater mobilization of aid workers and funding in the West African Sahel to meet the needs of a population facing one of the worst nutrition crises in recent years.

Over 10 million people are at risk of hunger in the Sahel before the September harvests, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO). In Niger, about half of the 13.4 million inhabitants are facing hunger. Up to two million Chadians and hundreds of thousands of Mauritanians and Malians also need assistance.

There have been early interventions and prepositioning, but more should have been done earlier, say aid workers and the response needs to be urgently scaled up.

In late 2009, the Famine Early Warning System Network highlighted signs of the crisis: a drop in cereal production, poor pastoral conditions and a dangerous combination of poverty and high food prices.

“There are always delays in supply pipelines. This means that decisions taken today will have an impact on the ground in late July or August. Food distributions should have started in April or May,” said the Swiss operation director of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Bruno Jochum.

Support remains crucial, he added, since during the months of August and September, people are typically left with no food while they wait for the next harvest.

Only 57 percent of the US$190 million emergency appeal by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for Niger is funded. In Chad, the World Food Programme (WFP) still lacks $23 million of the $65 million required for the food crisis.

The head of the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) for West Africa, Cyprien Fabre, noted, however, that the donor response is timelier than in 2005, when the food crisis caught many unprepared. This time, he said, early warning and response mechanisms were in place in most affected countries and funds were rapidly allocated.

“Operations are well under way in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali. In Chad, more actors are needed to respond properly. Funding will be available, if necessary.”

Chad

The situation in the Sahelian belt of Chad is especially worrying. “Chad is somehow like Niger in 2005,” explained the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) regional adviser for nutrition, Félicité Tchibindat. “The number of organizations on the ground is limited, so is the political will. On the bright side, humanitarian agencies and donors are now starting to respond.”

Such mobilization will help, but the imminent start of the rainy season will make the tricky task of bringing assistance to remote villages in a landlocked country even more challenging. WFP indicates that it can take as long as 3-5 months for food to arrive in Chad. In parts of the country, roads will be officially closed as of the end of June because of the rains.

“Even if there are cargos and cargos of stocks, if they cannot be delivered, people will not get food. Without prepositioned food, it will become very difficult. Agencies may have to look into air deliveries,” said OCHA’s public information, advocacy and donor relations officer for West Africa, Yvon A. Edoumou.

“Very vulnerable”

If there are normal harvests in the autumn, the population is expected to recover at the end of the year. A normal to wet rainy season is forecast by the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS).

Precipitation is crucial in a region where most agriculture is rain-fed. “If the rains fail, it will be a catastrophe in the whole region. People’s assets are significantly depleted. They have borrowed money to eat and are now waiting for the rains,” said ECHO’s Fabre.

The Sahel countries are among the poorest in the world. A third of the population of Chad and Niger is chronically undernourished. Each year, 300,000 under-five children die of malnutrition, according to UNICEF.

“The population is already very vulnerable,” said OCHA’s Edoumou. “When you live from one day to the next, any shock provokes a crisis. If the rains are poor, if the cattle are affected by a mysterious disease, people are in difficulty.”

Floods, drug trade threaten West Africa

from Reuters Alert Net

West Africa is experiencing it's second year of flooding. That along with drug trafficking make the poverty situation that much harder to solve. - Kale

By Doug Palmer

GENEVA - A second year of severe flooding and a growing threat to regional stability from drug trafficking are compounding problems of poverty in West Africa, a United Nations official said on Thursday.

Last year, floods disrupted the lives of 800,000 people in 14 West African countries and left 210 dead, as well as destroying crops and killing livestock, said D. Herve Ludovic de Lys, head of the West Africa regional office for the U.N. humanitarian affairs agency OCHA.

"Those people have barely recovered from the floods of last year and once again, they are experiencing a very heavy rainy season," Ludovic de Lys said in a briefing for reporters.

Floods have killed 30 people so far this year, and damaged the lives of 50,000 with another 45 days of heavy rain still expected, Ludovic de Lys said.

Recent flooding in Togo has affected 10,000 people, destroyed 400 houses and severed nine bridges, including some on the main trade road to Burkina Faso, he said.

Six are dead from floods in Mali's capital, he said.

The second year of flooding in a region otherwise experiencing a slow onset drought comes at time of high international food and energy prices that has made life more difficult for many developing countries.

A rise in illegal cocaine flows through West Africa from production centers in Latin America to markets in Europe and the Gulf region poses another threat, he said.

"This is a concern for us because West Africa is just emerging from period where we had very violent conflicts in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote D'Ivoire. We ... are very concerned because this drug trafficking could fuel conflicts, could bring back weapons," Ludovic de Lys said.

All of this makes this week's setback at world trade talks more difficult for West Africa. Talks collapsed before there was even any discussion of regional cotton producer demands for sharp cuts in U.S. and European Union cotton subsides.

Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Benin say those subsidies are destroying their cotton industries by encouraging excess U.S. and EU production that flood export markets.

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Ecowas President Blames Crises for Sub-Regional Poverty

from All Africa

This Day (Lagos)

By Juliana Taiwo
Abuja

President, ECOWAS Commission, Dr Mohamed Ibn Chambas, has lamented that the absence of peace and security in the sub-region is breeding poverty and making life unbearable.

He said this at the two-day capacity-building training on security threats for countries in the West African sub-region, which opened in Abuja yesterday, adding that "economic integration and development within the sub-region cannot be achieved without peace and security.

The growing intensity and duration of conflicts in Africa are primarily as a result of bad governance, economic failure and proliferation of small arms."

The training, entitled: Conflict Information Analysis and Threats in West Africa, was organised by the African Centre for Strategic Research and Studies, National Defence College (NDC), Abuja. 30 officials of ECOWAS member states attended the training funded by Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Commandant of the NDC, Rear Admiral Anthony Isah, while declaring the training open, said it was part of the United Nations programme aimed at preparing the sub-region for using the early warning system in the collection and analysis of data, formulation and analysis to the end-user.

He said with Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau and Cote d'Ivoire making the region a hotbed of conflicts, the UN chose the NDC as a Centre of Excellence, to empower the ECOWAS member nations.He, therefore, admonished participants to "identify the critical developments in a timely manner, to formulate coherent response strategies to either prevent or limit the effects of conflict."

WFP chief warns of "perfect storm" food crisis in west Africa

from AFP via Google News

Climate change, rising food prices and population growth could combine to create a "perfect storm" crisis that wreaks havoc in west Africa, the head of the UN World Food Programme warned Thursday.

"I have seen in West African what havoc could be caused by the triple threat of climate change, rising food prices and and population growth," said Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director at the end of a four-day trip in the region.

"But I have also seen that there are solutions to help people adapt before it is too late," she added.

Climate change might mean that African countries that depended on rain for food production would harvest half of normal output in the next 12 years, said Sheeran.

At the same time the cost of food had increased by 50 percent over the last five years while the numbers of people without access to adequate food, had also risen.

"I call this in part the perfect storm," she told reporters.

West Africa, a region housing the world's greatest numbers of poverty stricken countries, was battling droughts, desertification and soaring prices of food, she added.

A region like Darfur, in southern Sudan, was supporting more people than it did a few decades ago, but with less land in production, she said.

Food prices in such regional countries as Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal have risen steeply this year, sparking tensions and deadly protests in places.

One person has been killed and several wounded in unrest over food prices crisis in Mauritania in recent days.

Sheeran said rising prices of grains on the international market had also meant the UN food agency could buy less than it would have budgeted for from its emergency aid contributions.

"The overall cost of WFP reaching a hungry person has gone up 50 percent in the past five years," said Sheeran.

She travelled to Mali's ancient and arid city of Timbuktu to assess how some communities there are tackling the impact of climate change, malnutrition and food insecurity.

The WFP estimates that some 1.5 million children or 13 percent of infants aged less than five years are in the Sahel region are "acutely" malnourished and that this constitutes "the highest proportion in any region in the world".

"Rain-dependent areas in Africa may produce half yield by the next 12 years," she said.

West Africa to miss EU trade partnership deadline

from Reuters Alert Net

By Peter Murphy

ABIDJAN, Oct 5 (Reuters) - West Africa will miss a Dec. 31 deadline to sign a new trade partnership with the European Union and hopes to keep its preferential commercial privileges for up to two years while it negotiates, a West African official said.

Ministers from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) were meeting on Friday in Ivory Coast to agree a common approach ahead of talks later this month with the EU over signing of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).

These EPAs are set to replace trade arrangements giving African, Caribbean and Pacific states preferential access to the EU market. These preferences have to be scrapped to conform with World Trade Organisation (WTO) principles.

Anti-poverty campaigners say this shift to the EPA will expose fragile industry in poor African nations to crushing competition from more modern, efficient EU-based firms.

But Brussels, which is pushing the Dec. 31 deadline, says it will boost their economies and attract investment towards them.

"West Africa isn't ready to sign such an agreement by 31 December," Ablasse Ouedraogo, special adviser for trade negotiations to the ECOWAS President, told Reuters late on Thursday before the start of the West African meeting.

While EU chiefs were pushing for an interim agreement, ECOWAS ministers wanted to pursue a legal derogation that would postpone the introduction of the EPA to conform with WTO rules.

"We will then have the time to continue the (EPA) negotiations before the WTO can take action (against us)," he said, adding it "should take less than two years" for the West African bloc to prepare to sign the deal.

COMPROMISE

"It is the most logical and realistic way," he said, speaking in Ivory Coast's economic capital Abidjan.

EU officials have refused to countenance a postponement and have urged African officials to knuckle-down to negotiations.

"It is a WTO imposed deadline. We are governed by international rules and we intend to stick to them. Our waiver expires at the end of this year and we need a successor regime by the end of this year," Peter Power, spokesman for EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, told Reuters in Brussels.

Ouedraogo said he was confident the two trading blocs would reach an agreement that would avoid any disruption to trade with the EU, West Africa's No. 1 trading partner.

"There won't be any worst case scenario. As much as Africa needs the EU, the EU needs Africa. We will find a compromise to enable exchanges to continue that will reinforce the partnership and cooperation between West Africa and the EU," he said.

Pacific countries have made more progress and this week agreed with the EU to seek a pre-EPA interim deal that would include a timetable for cutting tariffs on goods, rules of origin and safeguard mechanisms to slow sudden surges of imports. (Additional reporting by Bill Schomberg in Brussels)