MALNUTRITION: NIGER: it's still a problem

 Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN
Ayesha Yaou with her family’s evening meal

MAGARIA, 6 April 2011 (IRIN) - The evening meal will be stewed leaves tasting somewhat like spinach, which the women pick every morning, yet crops were standing tall before the leafhoppers flew into Zinder in Niger and devoured anything green. The official response to a region on the edge of survival has been slow, but then the women went to see the Prefect.
It is after 6.30 in the evening in sandy and hot Dan Gouchy Haoussa, a village about a 1,000km east of Niamey, capital of Niger, and about 20km from the border with Nigeria. Nine children - the youngest about four years old and the oldest a teenager doing his homework - sit around a pot that Salamatou, one of their two mothers, has placed on the fire.
The stewed leaves of a wild bush called leptadenia hastate will be served when the tenth child, who is queuing at the only tap in the village, returns with water. It will be the family's first meal of the day.
More than 200,000 people in the district of Magaria have been living on meals like this for almost six months, but aid agencies warn that the worst is yet to come.
The traditional lean season, when farmers run out of previously harvested stocks of staple cereals like millet and sorghum, only starts in May, said Sylvain Musafiri, humanitarian officer at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
It will be some time before the rains come, new crops can be planted, then harvested, and there will be food again. Help will not be on the way anytime soon. Pleas for assistance, sent to Niamey by a variety of local authorities, have so far gone unanswered.
The national administration is in transition - a military junta-backed government makes way for an elected civilian government this week - but Musafiri said he was concerned that an adequate response by the authorities would take longer.
Mamamadou Baraze, governor of Zinder Region, where Magaria is located, told aid workers he feared the situation could get worse than the crisis in 2010 if help did not arrive in time.
How did Salamatou's family and the residents of Dan Gouchy Haoussa end up in this situation? IRIN found a chasm between the people of rural Niger and the policy-makers and implementers in Niamey, but also discovered a group of people led by women fighting enormous odds for the right to food.
There is a strong case for the incoming government to address the structural causes of food insecurity in Niger: a rapidly expanding population, lack of rural infrastructure and agricultural support to boost food production in a country increasingly affected by uncertain weather.
A recent food security conference in Niamey discussed the gap that needs to be bridged if the nation's development goals are to be achieved, but which keeps getting wider because the country constantly has to tackle emergencies.

Was it the rains?
Niger produces about four million tons of cereals, so it has to import about 20 percent of its cereal needs, 10 percent of which is brought in by traders and the remainder by aid agencies, said Prof Maxime Banoin, an agronomist.
Magaria district is a tiny green belt in the Zinder Region along Niger's border with Nigeria, where the people, mainly small-scale farmers, produce crops of millet and sorghum that account for most of the semi-arid region's cereal production when rain falls for the expected two-month period.
"In 2010, the rains were good our crops were going very well," said Abdou Gibada, the headman of Dan Gouchy Haoussa. The men in the villages constructed additional storage bins in anticipation of a bumper harvest.
When my father was alive, the produce from the land was sufficient to feed all of us [including my two wives and five children], but when he died, the small patch of land I inherited was not adequate
Banoin noted that in 2010 the country had produced five million tons of cereals, including millet, sorghum and cowpeas - more than enough for its needs until the next harvest in 2011.
Gibada holds his composure as he talks about the misfortune that struck them in August 2010, when hordes of leafhoppers (of the family cicadellidae) flew in and ate the standing crops in more than 300 villages across the district.
Nouri Habsou, the agricultural extension worker based in the neighbouring village of Dan Tchiou, had not seen crop destruction on this scale in more than 20 years of experience. "I was helpless; I had no pesticides to offer." She informed her superiors in Magaria town, who alerted Niamey.
Disbelieving authorities in the capital dismissed the calls for help. "They said this particular species of the insect, which usually attacks sorghum plants, is never known to have attacked millet," said Ahmadou Ama, head of agriculture in Magaria.
Months later, towards the end of 2010, an agriculture official turned up to make an assessment. "He was shocked by what he saw, and in subsequent investigations agriculture scientists in Niamey have offered us a possible explanation for the change in the behaviour of the insect," said Ama.
"They said the rains were unseasonably heavy, which led to a very good millet crop attracting the insects, who would have usually gone for the sorghum crops, which would normally have been standing then." The explanations made their way back to Magaria, but no aid.

 Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN
Elders of Dan Gouchy Haussa: the villagers have struggled to be heard

Ayesha Yaou and the women
In the affected villages people had already eaten the previous harvest's reserves and started crossing the border to Nigeria in search of food. In October 2010 an assessment by local authorities found that more than 15 percent had fled with their families, and the household head of almost 50 percent of families had migrated.
By December all the able-bodied men in Dan Gouchy Haoussa had gone to Nigeria. The women, children and elderly, left behind, struggled on until February 2011.
"We just could not sit and wait to die, we had to get help," said Ayesha Yaou, 33, who has seven children. She decided to organize the women.
"Each family contributed 50 CFA [about US$0.11] towards the fare to hire a taxi to Magaria [town] to make representation to the Prefect [administrative head] of Magaria district." They warned him that mass migration might be imminent.
"We were moved by the plight - we calmed the people, tried to convince them not to leave,"´ said the Prefect, Inoussa Garba. "I then managed to get some rice, maize and millet for the people, but it was not enough."
In March 2011, Garba approached UN agencies and international and national NGOs working in the neighbouring town of Zinder for help. He said Care International, the aid NGO, would begin a cash-for-work programme in a few villages in April, and the World Food Programme (WFP) intended to start blanket feeding in the area but only in May, when the traditional lean season began.
Staple grains are readily available in the markets along the road between Magaria and Zinder, but few farmers have the money to buy. Most have eaten or sold their livestock, although some still have a few goats, chickens or ducks.
The children in Magaria village were healthy because the medical NGO, Médecins Sans Frontières-Switzerland, had been treating them, said Ayesha Yaou.
Olivier Bonnet, project manager of MSF-Switzerland in Magaria, said their organization, whose mandate was to respond to emergencies, had been forced into a developmental role because of a lack of resources at the local level and was providing some free essential medicines, and training personnel at primary healthcare centres.

Returning men
Violent flare-ups linked to the upcoming elections in Nigeria forced some of the men to return at the beginning of April 2011, but they brought little or no money.
In Nigeria many saved rice or millet from their meals, or odd bits of food they received while begging. The food was dried in the sun and sent back to their families with returning Nigeriens. At home the dried food is soaked in water and cooked with the leaves.
"There is no charge for this service [carrying food]," said Zakaria Yaou, 25, who came back to his village, Kinoma, in the last week of March. "One day the carrier might need to ask me to take food for his family." He spent three months in Nigeria ferrying water in a cart, but managed to bring home only about 3,000 CFA (almost $7) for his five children and two wives.
A big family has its drawbacks - one with 12 members would need at least 1,000 CFA (about $2) worth of millet every day. "When my father was alive, the produce from the land was sufficient to feed all of us [including my two wives and five children], but when he died, the small patch of land I inherited was not adequate," said Yaou.
Sanousi Atta, a professor of agriculture who led discussions on food supply at the conference in Niamey, identified large families, which split the limited ancestral agricultural land into plots as small as two hectares, as the biggest obstacle to achieving food insecurity in Niger.
The villagers in Kinoma do not want to talk about family planning, but IRIN met a group of women from Yaouri Kaba, a village near Magaria town, who said their local primary health centre was offering information on contraception.

Next season?
Ama, the head of agriculture in Magaria, said the rainy season was approaching and they needed a supply of seeds and fertilizer as incentives to make the demoralized men stay to plant for the next season, "otherwise we will enter a cycle of endless emergency".
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said it intended distributing seeds ahead of the rainy season, which usually starts sometime in May or June.
Fertilizers are imported into the land-locked country mainly from Nigeria. The price of a 50kg bag used for growing millet is about 13,000 CFA ($30) and the ideal amount is about 100kg per hectare, but in Niger affordability limits the average application to just 2kg per hectare.
But for now, if anyone is listening, said Garba, the Prefect of Magaria, "We need food most urgently."
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=92387

MALNUTRITION: NIGER: Chasing food security

 Photo: Catherine-Lune Grayson/IRIN
illage chief and his sons tend to crops in Niger's Tahoua region (file photo)

NIAMEY, 29 March 2011 (IRIN) - Six months before the start of the 2009 rainy season the government of Niger was warned the rains would fail. In the drought that followed, more than half the population - 7.8 million people - faced food shortages. It was the third food crisis in seven years.
“It is part of my duties, and I gave a list of measures to the government to prepare for the drought, such as planting faster-yielding varieties of millet and sorghum (two of the main staples), but governments do not always listen to us,” said Prof Alhousseini Bretaudeau, executive secretary of the Permanent Interstates Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS), a scientific arm of the African Union.
“We have spent 30 years perfecting the science of predicting droughts, and developed tools to help countries prepare but few political leaders pay attention,” Bretaudeau told IRIN at a technical and scientific conference to brainstorm ways of getting the country out of chronic food and nutrition insecurity.
The Conférence Internationale sur la Sécurité Alimentaire et Nutritionnelle au Niger (CISAN) began on 28 March, hosted by a military-backed interim government that will give way to a newly elected civilian administration, headed by Mahamadou Issoufou, on 6 April. To many observers, CISAN represents a long-awaited attempt by Niger to get to grips with the food security issues that have plagued the country for decades.
“Better late than never - the conference was long overdue,” said Jean-Pierre Guengant, director of research at the France-based Institute of Research for Development (IRD), which gave the world Plumpy’nut, a peanut-based therapeutic food, and insecticide-treated mosquito nets.
Niger slipped into chronic food insecurity a long time ago, without any of the former governments noticing, said Guengant, who has spent a decade in the country.
Amongst those who singularly failed to address food issues was Mamadou Tandja, ousted by the military in February 2010. “He did not accept there was a food crisis [in 2010] because he did not trust what the NGOs were telling him - he thought they wanted to make money,” said the man behind the conference, Col Aboulkarim Goukoye, head of the Higher Authority of Food Security (HASA).
“The second reason was that he was a very proud man - he did not want to accept that there was a problem,” said Goukoye, who is also the interim military junta’s spokesperson.
“Under the previous regime words such as ‘food crisis’ and even ‘nutrition’ were taboo - we would have had to pack our bags and leave,” Simone Winneg, coordinator of Humedica, a German medical NGO, commented.
“When we came in power,” Goukoye said, “all the technical people in the agriculture department came to us and said: ’You are probably thinking of security issues, but we have a food crisis.” They turned to the international community for help. Mahamadou Danda, prime minister of the interim government, asked Goukoye to find out how the country could address the recurring food crises. In June 2010 HASA was set up and the idea of developing a food strategy was born. “It naturally led to the idea of a conference where we could consult with technicians and scientists to help develop this strategy,” Goukoye said.

Inclusiveness
Will the incoming regime follow through? Goukoye said he was trying to get at least 10 of the recently elected parliamentarians involved. “Our strategy is not going to be any particular government’s strategy but a Nigerien strategy.” Over the next few days, participants including technical experts from across the world will look at ways to ease access to food, reduce vulnerability and improve governance in food security.
Ibrahim Mayaki, head of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the African Union’s development agency, who served as prime minister of Niger from 1997 to 2000 and was asked to head the conference, said the process was as inclusive as possible, with all previous Nigerien regimes invited to participate.
Governance was a key issue in tackling food insecurity. Local authorities were in the frontline of government service delivery as “the first connection between the government and the people in the rural areas, where most of our people live” and could recognize and the first signs of food insecurity. Mayaki suggested empowering them to address the issue.
Previous regimes had not paid much heed to warnings by technical experts in the country. “This is the first time someone is paying attention,” said Prof Maxime Banoin, an agronomist and head of the scientific and technical committee organizing the conference, who noted that other experts had also presented explanations for why the country was grappling with food insecurity.

So what is wrong with Niger?
The northern two-thirds of Niger, the biggest country in West Africa, is desert, so the entire food requirement depends on the rainy season from May to September to grow crops in the south. “It is a scary thought, and often things go wrong with it [the rainy season],” said Humedica’s Winneg.
 Photo: Catherine-Lune Grayson/IRIN
Two-thirds of Niger is desert

In an analysis prepared for the conference, Banoin and IRD’s Guengant identified the structural causes of the recurring food crises: food production has not kept up with population growth, and rainfall has declined considerably since the 1960s.
“Niger has the world’s highest fertility rate, with an average of seven children per family, so the population has grown at 3.5 percent per year, while food production, at best, has grown at about 2.5 percent per year,” said Guengant. Niger has struggled with a structural deficit for the past 20 years.
Declining rainfall has exacerbated the problem. The areas that grow staples like sorghum and millet, which need a minimum of 400mm of rain per year, has shrunk from 25 percent of the country to 12 percent since the 1960s.
Sorghum yields have dropped from between 600kg and 800kg per hectare in the 1960s to between 200kg and 300kg per hectare, while millet production has remained stagnant at 400kg per hectare.
Besides the shrinking amount of rain, the low production has highlighted the inadequate support given to agriculture, researchers said. “We have to have a multisectoral approach to finding solutions,” Guengant noted.
Investment in biotechnology to improve yields, adequate inputs, agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation systems, and education to empower women in a society that encourages them to have more children, are some of the policy measures the government should take, said Banoin and Guengant.
Harnessing the Niger River system could potentially give Niger 330,000 hectares of irrigated agricultural land.
The country has one of the world’s lowest scores in educating girls,the world’s highest maternal mortality rate, and one of the highest infant mortality rates, which all highlight the low status of women in Niger, and the cause of the high fertility rate.
Only four out of 10 girls are enrolled in primary school, two out of 10 attend secondary school, and only three out of 100 make it into high school, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The social reasons for having large families are deep-seated. “If we have only two children, what if they both die? You need to have at least seven or eight so you still have some children - it is always good to have more children,” said Hadiza Halidou, a woman participating in the conference.
“Women’s education is very important - they are also the main producers of food, which men do not acknowledge,” said NEPAD’s Mayaki.

More money needed
Traditional donors like Europe and the US have been concentrating on their internal financial woes, so African governments had to become more proactive about mobilizing resources to invest in agriculture locally and regionally, Mayaki said.
The technical and scientific conference would be followed by a leaders’ conference, where the new food security strategy would be presented, said HASA’s Goukoye. Regional heads of state, traditional donors, and local and international NGOs would be invited to attend for feedback and investment opportunities.
Mayaki said Africa should consider tapping emerging economies like South Africa, Brazil, China, India and Russia for money. Goukoye commented: “The biggest problem in Africa is implementation and follow-up.”
So what would happen if the new regime did not consider food security a priority and reneged on measures to address it - would the military junta come back?
“Just for that?” Goukoye said. “But I don’t think governments will not act - food security is everyone’s problem now.”

Mothers walking home with supplementary rations for their under-two children in Niger's central region of Tahoua


http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=3604033512937490051

POVERTY: NAMIBIA: When we have food, we are rich

 Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN
Evard Haukongo with a millet plant in the test patch where he used conservation agriculture techniques

JOHANNESBURG, 7 February 2011 (IRIN) -
In the deep north of Southern Africa’s driest country, Namibia, about 10km from the Angolan border, live an elderly farming couple and their 10 adopted children, who watch the sky every day for rain. If the heavens do not open in another three weeks, they will not have enough food this year.
Pearl millet, the staple grain in northern Namibia and known as mahangu in the local language, is a drought-tolerant grain grown in semi-arid and arid areas.
But Evard Haukongo, 67, wants just the right amount of rain. In the past four years, he and other farmers in the Omsati region have struggled with floods. In the years before 2007, dry spells claimed their precious millet and many of their livestock.
“Farming is very hard now, it is a tough job - they say the climate is changing,” he said, wiping the sweat off his forehead as he pulled weeds from the sandy soil of his five-hectare smallholding.
It is early in the morning but you can almost bake a loaf of bread in the heat. The tender green millet plants, only 60cm high, growing out of the dry ground do not really stand a chance.
“Me and my wife are the last of the farmers in our family - this will die with us,” he said. Their own five children have all grown up and “found their own ways”, as his wife, Mirjam, put it, and settled in towns.
“Maybe if they [the adopted children] want to farm they will divide our land into 10 pieces and grow vegetables,” he said, laughing.
He looked on fondly as five of his adopted children set off for school. Despite not being related by blood, the children are close and share everything - from wild berries picked after school to every slice of bread.
Evard and Mirjam converse in English because they trained as teachers.
The goal was to return to their village to farm their land, and teach in the neighbouring school.
“We are farmers by birth - it is what we are - but we also loved to teach. We were teachers for some hours every morning [for two decades] and then farmers for the rest of the day,” said Mirjam, digging her spade into the ground. “If we did not plant we did not eat.”
The money they earned as teachers was not enough to feed and clothe their five children. Now, retired and living on a monthly pension of about US$137, they barely have enough to cover the needs of 10 children.
All the children - from the eldest, who is 20 years old, to the youngest, just three years old - spend most of their day tending the millet plants. “When we have mahangu we feel we are rich, even if we do not have money,” Evard said.
The subsistence farmers gave a home to the 10 children, passed on by dying or poor parents who were either friends or distant relatives.
They also opened their home to me for a day and a night.



 Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN
Children in the Haukongo household share their food

“Maybe it was HIV [that claimed some of the parents], I am not sure, but there are many children in our village [Ohendjeno]. Every house has many children - you do not leave them like that [orphaned].”
Namibia has an HIV prevalence rate of about 13 percent among adults aged 15 to 49 years, according to 2009 figures from UNAIDS.
The children either want to be nurses, teachers or doctors. Rachel, their eldest daughter, who works part-time as a shop assistant, loves farming. “When you see the mahangu on the field it is very beautiful,”
she said.
Things might be looking up for small-scale farmers. The Namibian government, with the help of a pilot climate change adaptation project run by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), is providing improved millet seeds that fruit earlier, and teaching water conservation farming techniques. Evard’s family is among 3,200 households who have been targeted.
He has tested the techniques on a small patch of his land, where the millet started fruiting within a month. “You can see the difference - the millet was planted in the furrows, so the roots have better access to the moisture and can survive in the heat.”
He was also given fertilizer, which he used to enrich the barren soil in the test patch. “I have no money to buy fertilizer for all the plants - but any little help is good,” he commented
Andreas Shimbolweni, manager of the UNDP project said the government provided subsidized fertilizer and seeds, but "The rains are extremely variable in this part of the world and the climate change trends predict they will continue to become even more variable."
Weather is king, said Kaunapawa Shapenga, the government’s agricultural extension officer for the region, on a visit to the Haukongo smallholding. “We never know what to expect - we have tried so many things… but we are giving out [seeds for] faster maturing varieties of millet, so at least the farmer does manage to grow something.”
Farmers have also experimented with cultivating rice in the some of the flood plains, or oshanas, found in the midst of the arid land, which remain flush with water for most of the year. “You cannot grow anything else in these plains but rice,” Shapenga said.
However, many of these farmers faced opposition from communities because the oshanas were communal land used for grazing, so “very few continue to grow rice.”
Evard and Mirjam said a solution would have to be found, if not for them then for their children, and perhaps rice was an option. “We will need to barricade the oshanas, protect them from animals, convince communities,” Shapenga suggested.
“But we cannot live without mahangu,” Mirjam said. Later that night, after a dinner of mahangu and a chicken killed in this reporter's honour, Evard pointed to a group of stars, the position of which tells them when to plant. “The stars are midway in the sky, which means half the rainy season is over and we just have two more months.”
Everyone looks up at the night sky in silence. The next morning an excited Evard wakes me up at the crack of dawn. “I saw a dark line in the sky above Angola, which means the rains will be here soon - maybe another three weeks." He took a deep breath. "Maybe we will be okay.”
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91843

MALNUTRITION: Niger between two seasons of hunger

04 Feb 2011
Despite the large-scale response to the nutritional crisis from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and many other organisations, tens of thousands of children suffered from malnutrition in Niger in 2010. In spite of better harvests, 2011 also looks set to be a critical year. I travelled to the Zinder region, in the east of the country.



  © Philippe Latour
Village elder Salouf Kina and his son Abukar discuss the latest village events.

Around a hundred years ago, the father of Salouf Kina, 80, founded the small village of Gueza, three hours' drive east of Zinder, the former capital of Niger.
"He was taking his cows to a new grazing ground and decided to settle here with his family. There was plenty of greenery and water here at the time. I've always lived here, but this year [2010] is the worst I've seen," he recalled with a faltering voice.
Today, Gueza, with 2,000 inhabitants, is a patchwork of mud huts built along sandy streets, where the odd tree provides some rare shade. In the surrounding area, a few scrubby fields of millet left over from the recent harvest give the hills an air of neglect.
Salouf Kina's son, Aboukar, has been one of the village wise men for more than 50 years. Aboukar, who is also a neighbourhood chief, tells of the terrible lean period that the inhabitants of Gueza experienced in 2010.
"At the end of 2009, the harvests were very bad and some families harvested nothing at all because of the drought,” he explained. “When people's stocks ran out and they could no longer borrow, they had to leave the village - young men at first, to go and work in Nigeria, then whole families.
“Between May and September, more than half of the village fled, leaving behind only women, young children and the elderly. We're a long way from everything and few people are interested in us. If MSF hadn't set up a feeding centre at the health centre, all of us would have left and the village might have died."
Gueza's Integrated Health Centre is one of the only concrete buildings in the village. It is the young Mamane Bashir, the centre manager, who greets us. During this period in late December, there were few consultations and MSF had packed up its out-patient nutrition education and rehabilitation centre for cases of severe malnutrition (CRENAS). It is hard to imagine that three months ago some 300 children were being treated by the MSF team here.
"The rains came very early this year and the malnutrition situation was exacerbated by malaria, which hit the weakest children,” explained Bashir. “Last August, we treated around 600 children, compared with just a hundred or so in August, 2009. This is also linked to MSF's presence, which ensured that the medicines and therapeutic foods didn't run out."
In Zinder and Magaria, the main towns in this region of Niger, at the end of December, there are still some 200 children in the beds of the CRENIs, the intensive hospitalisation centres set up by MSF for the most serious cases of malnutrition. However, these facilities - rows of beds under large tents - now seem relatively empty. At the height of the nutritional crisis, in August and September, more than 800 children were being treated there, the majority of them on the brink of death.
Kelima, 32, and a mother of four, took her youngest child, Djamilou, aged 15 months, to the Zinder CRENI in early December. He had lost a lot of weight. The MSF doctor diagnosed him with severe anaemia combined with malaria. After being immediately put on a drip and then fed therapeutic foods, he gradually gained weight. Two weeks later, he smiles and waves his hands when spoken to. "Soon we'll be able to go back to the village" explained Kelima, relieved. "But this year, it was really too difficult to feed the children; there were only a few handfuls of millet for the whole family...".
"Unfortunately, 2010 was the year that broke every record,” underlined Dr Moïse Moussa Gabrial, head of the Magaria CRENI. "Since January 2010, we've seen more than 6,200 children. At the end of August, we had around 500 hospitalised children. We had planned to recruit and train medical staff, but the situation was so bad that we had to hire people locally and train them on the job.
“At the height of the malnutrition crisis, 280 people were working for MSF at the CRENI. And tragically, we saw the deaths of many children - 133 in September alone - who had arrived in a desperate nutritional state and were often suffering from malaria".
However, 2010 was also the year of unprecedented mobilisation to fight famine in Niger. The government, born of a coup d'état at the beginning of the year, made food security one of its central causes and called upon international organisations to help. A number of organisations, including MSF, provided extensive support for care facilities and implemented large-scale prevention strategies, particularly based on appropriate food supplements, making it possible to limit the damage.
"We dare not imagine what would have happened if no one had rallied to help", explained Patrick Barbier, MSF's Head of Mission in Niger. "But what worries us today is that, despite some good harvests at the end of 2010, 2011 still risks being a very difficult year, in a context which remains one of extreme poverty, often combined with a lack of access to care.
“In nearly all the country's regions, families are heavily in debt and must now, after the harvest, pay back three or four measures of millet for every two borrowed. Added to which, many families’ livestock assets have been reduced from a whole herd at the start of the year to just a few goats and sheep. International organisations and aid agencies must remain extremely vigilant and prepare to intervene on a large scale again in 2011."
In Gueza, Salouf Kina's grandson and Aboukar's son has just turned 20 and already has the serious face of an old man. In a few days, he will set off for Nigeria to sell tea in the street to enable his family to survive in the village and keep the hope that a life there is still possible alive.
http://www.msf.org/msf/articles/2011/02/niger-between-two-seasons-of-hunger.cfm

MALNUTRITION: ZIMBABWE: Big hope for small grains

Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN

Small grains preferred
HARARE, 15 October 2010 (IRIN) - The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched a project in Zimbabwe recently to promote the use of small grains such as millet and sorghum to boost food security in three drought-prone provinces - Matabeleland North, Matabeleland South and Masvingo.
Small grains are considered drought tolerant and have better nutritional value than maize, which is viewed as an unsuitable crop in these provinces.
The US$399,000 project - Promoting Production, Processing and Marketing of Small Grains in the Marginal Areas in Zimbabwe - which envisages the provision of improved seed varieties, will target small farmers, and aims to be up and running by the rainy season starting in the next few weeks.
It will provide small grain inputs sufficient for the cultivation of half a hectare, and this will also enable farmers to produce seeds for the next planting season.
Gaoju Han, FAO's sub-regional director for Southern Africa and Zimbabwe's country representative, said: "The project will also build the capacity of community based smallholder seed producers so as to ensure sustainable availability of high quality small grains seed."
Ministry of Agriculture extension workers will provide assistance and training on the production of small grains, and inform communal farmers of their benefits.
Challenges
Han said production of small grains over the years had faced several obstacles, including the limited access to seed, poor prices, low yields and the huge flocks of voracious red-billed quelea birds.
"These challenges have contributed towards the reduction in the area allocated to small grains on the one hand, and an expansion of the maize area on the other. FAO’s aim is to assist the Ministry of Agriculture to address these and other challenges that have limited the production of small grains by smallholder farmers," he said.
"What is now required is for the key players to exploit the unique attributes of small grains such as drought tolerance and their better nutritional value compared to other cereal crops," Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture Ngoni Masoka told IRIN.
Food security expert and the former Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union president Davidson Mugabe said the launch was welcome and if properly conducted, would go a long way towards ensuring food security.
We need as a country to come up with policies that ensure that we grow crops which are suitable to the different regions
"We need as a country to come up with policies that ensure that we grow crops which are suitable to the different regions, and the three provinces for the programme are ideal for small grains because they record low annual rainfall," he said.
Zimbabwe's rapid decline from food security has been blamed on a combination of events - including droughts and the disruption of agriculture in 2000, when President Robert Mugabe launched the fast-track land reform programme, which redistributed more than 4,000 white commercial farms to landless blacks.
In the first quarter of 2009 about seven million people - more than half the population - depended on food assistance. The government estimates about 1.3 million people will require food assistance in the first quarter of 2011.
Marketing
Davidson Mugabe said it was also important to popularize the consumption of small grains and there was a "need for innovation when processing food from small grains. Only recently I ate a cake made from millet."
Dumisani Nyoni, the provincial agricultural officer for Matabeleland North, told IRIN farmers’ yields in the province had in recent years been declining.
"The farmers would save some [small] grain [seed] from their harvest which they continued to use as seed and over the years yields had gone down. When we introduce new seed varieties to the farmers, their produce will be higher. One challenge though that needs to be tackled urgently will be the threat posed by quelea birds which are a problem in the province. The department of national parks [needs] to be capacitated in order to eliminate that menace."
Quelea birds, which roam in flocks that can grow to millions, prefer the seeds of wild grasses to those of cultivated crops, but their numbers make them a constant threat to fields of sorghum, wheat, barley, millet and rice.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=90783

MALNUTRITION: Nigerian food bought for Niger

KANO, 3 June 2010 (IRIN) - Stocks of millet and sorghum in northern Nigeria's markets are dwindling as traders buy them up to export across the border to Niger, where some 10 million people face food insecurity. Grain merchants from Niger head to Dawanau market in Kano - West Africa's largest grain market - to buy truck-loads of millet and sorghum, locally known as Guinea corn, to bolster declining food stocks. "An average of 30 trucks of grain leaves this market to Niger daily. Grain traders from Niger are busy buying every bag of grain they can find to satisfy the high food demand back home, where food is scarce," Aminu Mohammed, a grain merchants' spokesman in Dawanau market, told IRIN. "This excessively high demand from Niger, coupled with local demand, has resulted in the shrinking of our grains stockpile," Mohammed said. Dawanau market supplies much of Nigeria and many of its neighbours, but part of the grain supplied to it is grown in Niger. Over the past three months, thousands of Nigeriens from southern Niger have poured across the border to the five northern Nigerian states of Katsina, Yobe, Jigawa, Sokoto and Borno, in search of casual labour to raise money to buy grain. "I left behind my two wives and nine children in my village and send them grain and other items I purchase here every week," Umaru Isa, from Falanku in southern Niger's Maradi region, told IRIN. The Maradi, Zinder, Diffa, Tilaberi and Tahoua regions in Niger are hardest hit by food insecurity. Isa made the 120km trek with 32 compatriots and took up water vending to earn money to buy food. Aid agencies have stepped up their response to the crisis in Niger, and the transitional government has announced that food will be distributed to 1.5 million people, but Nigeriens in Katsina told IRIN that the food handouts were too meagre to meet their needs. Katsina State Agriculture Commissioner Sani Makana said food from its emergency reserves would be distributed to some of the immigrants.