Sudan's Ethnic Cleansing

Hundreds of thousands of Southern Sudanese who have spent most of their lives in the north now find themselves their lives upended when the country split in half. In July South Sudan broke off from Sudan and formed its own nation. But for southerners living north of the border the south’s independence compounded their misery. There will not be any dual citizenship for southerners living in the north. And it is not clear what the status will be for northerners living in the south. The Sudanese government says it is going to strip all southerners of their citizenship starting in April. If they want to remain in Sudan, they must apply for a visa, work permit, residency papers and the like, all of which will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get for impoverished, illiterate people who often have no documents showing when or where they were born. Even if someone was born in the north the restrictions are the same. If the person belongs to an ethnic group that is from the south then that person is considered a southerner.

More than 350,000 southerners have recently relocated, by bus and by barge, from the north to the south.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/world/africa/for-south-sudan-woman-misery-on-both-sides-of-the-border.html

Africa for Salehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

A story is told that when the first European missionaries arrived to Africa, they had a Bible in their hand, and that the African had land in his. The ‘good’ missionaries said to the African to crose his eyes and hold on to the Bible so that they could pray together for the ‘uncivilised’ African’s salvation. When the ‘obedient’ African opened his eyes, in his hand was the Bible, and in the missionary’s hands, was the land.

In the last few decades, millions of hectares have been reported as being under negotiation for lease or sale by developing countries to the rich countries. The land in question refers to 227 million hectares (561 million acres) of land – an area the size of northwest Europe –having been reportedly sold, leased or licensed, largely in Africa and mostly to international investors. The World Bank estimates that in 2009 alone nearly 60 million hectares of land were purchased or leased in developing countries all over the world – an area the size of France. Ethiopia is one of the world’s largest recipients of humanitarian food and development assistance, and in 2011, received more than 700,000 tonnes of food and £1.8bn in aid; at the same time, it has offered three million hectares (7.4 million acres) of virgin land to foreign corporations, such as Karuturi. Karuturi Global terms the deal it has with Ethiopia, “the deal of the century: £150 a week to lease more than 2,500 sq. km (1,000 sq. miles) of virgin, fertile land – for 50 years”. The lowest prices are in Africa. “It’s very good land. It’s quite cheap. In fact it is very cheap. We have no land like this in India,” says Karmjeet Sekhon, Karuturi Global Project Manager of what is expected to be one of Africa’s largest farms. “There you are lucky to get 1% of organic matter in the soil. Here, it is more than 5%. We don’t need fertiliser or herbicides. There is absolutely nothing that will not grow on it. To start with, there will be 20,000 hectares of oil palm, 15,000 hectares of sugar cane and 40,000 hectares of rice, edible oils, and maize and cotton. We are building reservoirs, dykes, roads, towns of 15,000 people. This is phase one. In three years’ time, we will have 300,000 hectares cultivated and maybe 60,000 workers. We could feed a nation here.” While the prospects that they can feed a nation is undoubtedly real, the harsh reality is that Ethiopia will not be that nation.

Despite foreseeable terrible consequences, the appetite among the rich countries to own a piece of this developing-country fertile land continues to grow: it’s like witnessing bandits arguing over whom has the right to rob which bank.

Land grab advocates argue it is a “win-win” situation, whereby investors profit and “host” nations benefit from economic development, improved agricultural infrastructure, and employment opportunities.

Yet Professor Reg Noble of Ryerson University in Toronto reminds us that there is enough food in the world to feed the 7 billion-plus people at current food production rates, if the commoditisation of food was not the driving force of this phenomenon. Anuradha Mittal, founder of the Oakland Institute argues that, according to his organization’s ground-breaking report on African land grabs, "The land grab phenomenon is being done in the name of modernizing agriculture and expanding African economies, but it cuts out the core natural resources that support African livelihoods for the majority – land and water. This huge transfer of natural wealth to outside investors is eroding food security, water security and cultural integrity for local people.” Professor Noble, a research associate in food security and community development, blames the land rush on the increasing demand to acquire fertile land by a corporate global minority seeking bio-fuel crops and the new frontier; the need for carbon credits has now turned into a lucrative business.

Beneath the arguments and justifications advocated by land grab speculators and institutions like the African Development Bank, World Bank, Western University pension funds and global agri-business corporations, is the need to produce more food for the commodity market and raw materials for the biofuels industries. Oxfam states that most of the land deals made in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, and Tanzania have been to grow crops for export commodities, including cut flowers and biofuels. In Mozambique, where approximately 35% of households are chronically food insecure, only 32,000 hectares out of the 433,000 approved for land deals between 2007 and 2009 were for food crops.

Affected communities are being pushed far away from their fertile land, and are being boxed into corners next to each other, heightening the probability of resource conflict, a common feature in many African countries. Beyond that is the loss of land ownership while at same time remaining physically present, because there are large-scale agricultural activities next to displaced populations who have neither access to nor the ability to benefit from the leased or sold land. Nearly 10,000 people were displaced from the Namwasa and Luwunga reserve lands in Uganda, with no resettlement assistance and no compensation. In fact, compensation for the leased or sold land is poor or non-existent; likely jobs from land grabs do not materialize; the most vulnerable of the population, namely the women and children, suffer more; and there is irreversible damage done to ecosystems, such as draining of marshland and clearing of forest.

Since colonisation, from in the post-independence era to the age of economic liberalisation thanks to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund African leaders at both the community and national level have always shown a high degree of propensity towards any investors who knock at their door selling ideas of how to turn around the fortunes of their nations. Africa is a very lucrative area due to failed or dysfunctional political systems and a despicable crop of leaders who are easy prey for manipulation, if not exploitation, by any would-be investors. The political elites in African countries have a demeaning attitude towards a majority of their population, and will stop at nothing when it comes to expropriating their people’s resources in an effort to make a ‘killing’ out of anything that previous regimes did not act on during their time in power. South Sudan has also seen a surge of investor interest since the country’s independence in July last year. The South Sudanese government, along with foreign aid agencies, has held a series of events to promote foreign investment in the country, including an international conference in Washington in December. But David Deng, Research Director of the South Sudan Law Society, says that a large number of potential investors have visited the country since the 2005 comprehensive peace agreement, which ended a 22-year civil war between the north and south. Last year, researchers estimated that around 9% of South Sudan’s land had already been leased or bought by investors before independence. Deng said, “Here we have a country that is probably at the most unpredictable time in its entire history, faced with a very real possibility of a return to war, with a government that is just getting on its feet, and it still manages to attract considerable amounts of interest from foreign investors”.

When one hears Western media preaching that Africa is "open for business", it simply means that Africans havn’t learned any of the lessons they should have after many years of exploitation, bringing misery to the continent’s vulnerable populations. Political leaders from countries leasing land argue that it is prudent to lease land in the name of business and economic liberalization. But the ‘voiceless’ and ‘powerless’ local farmers who bear the brunt of the consequences that come with land grabs have a different take. In short, their patience will run out as they quickly approach the edge with no options; they will either have to accept ‘falling off the cliff’ or step forward and say enough is enough, and seek to reclaim the land. African land experts will tell you that this would be like opening a Pandora’s Box that has been steaming for several decades. Across Africa, the box is full of unresolved historical land grievances, so much so that no African government will withstand its ‘explosion’, as time and again, its ugly face has destabilized populations in Kenya, South Sudan and Zimbabwe. But as Kenya and South Sudan walk down the road of the land leasing business, one needs not be a rocket scientist to expect the unexpected.

Adapted from here

Gay solidarity

Bans against homosexuality in Uganda, and in many other countries of Africa, go back as far as the British colonial government, which was guided heavily on social issues by Christian missionaries. A few African countries, such as South Africa, have stripped away colonial-era prohibitions against homosexuality, but other countries, such as Uganda, are working in the opposite direction, adding heavier penalties to the laws that currently exist.

The current antihomosexuality bill under consideration would impose the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” committed by “serial offenders.” The bill made its first appearance in 2009, but was withdrawn last year after significant pressure from donor nations such as the United States, Britain and Sweden. President Obama called the bill “odious.”

The Ugandan Minister of Ethics Simon Lokodo has accompanied police to shut down a workshop in Entebbe for gay rights activists and to arrest its organizer. He told participants to leave or he would order the police to use force. "I have closed this conference because it's illegal,” Mr. Lokodo was quoted as saying by the Daily Monitor, a Ugandan newspaper. “We do not accept homosexuality in Uganda. So go back home."

Public assembly of gay people is not a crime under Ugandan law, although homosexuality itself is. Amnesty International condemned the raid of the gay-rights workshop and called on the Ugandan government to “end its outrageous harassment of people involved in lawful activities. This is an outrageous attempt to prevent lawful and peaceful activities of human rights defenders in Uganda,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s secretary general in a statement. “The government of Uganda must protect all people against threats, violence, and harassment irrespective of their real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.”

an injury to one, is an injury to all

Many apologists for Mugabe's dictatorship in Zimbabwe describe it as a "socialist" regime and while Socialist Banner have our reservations about the claims of the International "Socialist" Organisation being socialist, too, we feel the issue of democratic free expression is important enough to post extracts from their appeal for solidarity against their harassment.

"Six Zimbabwe socialists, including myself, remain charged with “inciting public violence”, following the dismissal by the magistrate of our application for a discharge in Harare last week. We were arrested on February 19 2011, while meeting to watch video footage of democracy protests in Egypt and Tunisia. Forty-five comrades were originally charged with treason for attending the International Socialist Organisation film screening, and one, David Mpatsi, died following a rapid deterioration in his health while he was imprisoned and denied medical treatment. Although the treason charges were eventually dropped, inciting public violence carries a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment.

Our lawyer had applied for the discharge at the close of the state’s case, on the basis that it had failed to produce sufficient evidence to require us putting our defence. But the magistrate ruled, without giving any explanation, that the state had established a prima facie case, so the trial is set to continue on February 27. Hopefully we will finish giving our evidence on March 2, but we are now aware of the state’s deliberately frustrating delaying tactics.

It is clear that the state aims to continue with its harassment of any opposition voice despite what transpired during the trial with its ‘star witness’. He called himself Jonathan Shoko and said he was a police officer attached to the Criminal Investigation Unit, but was exposed to be from the dreaded Central Intelligence Organisation (secret police) and his real name was Rodwell Chitiyo. He took an oath under a false name.

The main purpose of this witness, who had attended the ISO meeting, was to incriminate innocent people. But his evidence, upon which the state is relying, lacked any credibility. He not only lied about his identity, but also about what happened, and it is interesting to note that even the state-sponsored Herald newspaper pointed to the loopholes. The same magistrate could be seen laughing during the time ‘Shoko’ was giving his hilarious, made-up and rehearsed evidence. Any magistrate in an open and democratic society would surely have dismissed the case immediately. When he was handing down the ruling, he avoided looking at us - an indication that it had been decided by someone other than himself.

The trial is just one example of the harassment of any opposition. On February 14 the police violently broke up the march on parliament organised by the radical Women of Zimbabwe Arise, and a week earlier dozens of armed riot police prevented an academic lecture on ‘The global financial crisis and implication for the third world: the case for Zimbabwe’ from taking place. It was to be addressed by professor Patrick Bond from South Africa at a city hotel, but the police turned away anybody they thought might be participants.

All this sends a strong message of intimidation by Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, as we move towards the proposed constitutional referendum and, possibly, elections this year. The intimidation is meant to silence any opposing voice, as the Zimbabwean political crisis nears its climax.

We were saddened by the court ruling not only for our own sake, but for the sake of all Zimbabweans who are willing to fight against the system. Though we had hoped to celebrate the first anniversary of our arrest as free people on February 19, we remain optimistic that we will come through - especially with the support that we continue to receive from our families, friends, comrades in Zimbabwe and throughout the world.

We are stepping up our campaign to put the government under pressure to drop the charges against us and we appeal to comrades outside the country to help us in doing this. The ruling showed that the state thinks it can do anything and, if pressure is not put on them, we will find ourselves sent back to Chikurubi prison."

Tafadzwa Choto
Harare

It won't wash

It will take two centuries for sub-Saharan Africa to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, according to NGO WaterAid.

“Diarrhoea, 90 percent of which is attributable to inadequate sanitation and dirty water, is the single biggest killer of children in Africa, and yet sanitation targets are off-track,” Tom Slaymaker, one of the report’s authors.

Every day, 2,000 children die from diarrhoea in sub-Saharan Africa. Four out of 10 people do not have access to safe water, while seven out of 10 do not have appropriate sanitation facilities.

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are being sidelined as governments concentrate on health and education. It is not a sexy topic - politicians much prefer to say they're opening a hospital or school, rather than building some toilets.

In Ethiopia, 193,000 deaths per year are WASH-related, and 71.4 million people have no access to sanitation facilities. Similar figures apply to Mali, Niger, Benin, Ghana and Congo, where 194,000 deaths a year are WASH-related and 49.5 million people have no access to sanitation facilities.

According to WaterAid, the Côte d'Ivoire administration targeted 0.06 percent of its GDP to water and sanitation, Ghana spent 0.29 percent, Liberia 0.28 percent, Madagascar 0.28 percent, Nigeria 0.18 percent, Uganda 0.41 percent and Zambia 0.56 percent. African governments need to commit at least 3.5 percent of GDP to sanitation and water to get back on track,

Over one billion people will miss the global MDG sanitation target if things continue unchanged In Asia, India will not reach its MDG on sanitation before 2047, while Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal will not achieve the target before 2028.

Liberia's land-grab

Hundreds of villagers and town residents of Liberia’s Grand Cape Mount Country have attracted nationwide attention in their bid to recover what they say is land seized from them and turned over to a Malaysian agro-industrial concern.

Malaysian company Sime Darby Plantations was granted a permit on 21 April 2010 to cultivate 10,000 hectares of palm oil in Bomi and Grand Cape Mount counties. Now, the company has applied for an additional 15,000 hectares for palm oil cultivation in Garwular and Gola Konneh districts, in the Grand Cape Mount County, and another 20,000 hectares in Gbarpolu County.

“This is unbearable,” Mary Freeman Sinje Town said. “Our government must care for us and don’t allow these people to kill us silently. What have we done to go through all of these sufferings? This land belongs to us. We were born here and we give birth to our children here too. This is the only place we know.”

too little, too late

Of 22.9 million HIV positive people in sub-Saharan Africa, 5.6 million are South African, according to a recent UNAIDS report. But only 1.6 million HIV positive people in South Africa are on antiretrovirals (ARVs), the report said. This amounted to only 37 percent of those who should be on treatment, said Catherine Sozi, coordinator of UNAIDS in South Africa. "We need to put another 1.6 million onto treatment by 2015,"she said.

Botswana, Namibia and Rwanda have more than 80 percent of their eligible HIV-positive populations on ARVs. In Ethiopia, Kenya, Swaziland and Zambia between 60 percent and 79 percent are on ARVs, according to the report.

The Swiss company Lonza is to manufacture anti-retroviral drugs in South Africa in joint venture with the South African government, named Ketlaphela ["I will live or survive" in Sesotho], will establish the first plant to manufacture active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) for anti-retroviral medicines in South Africa.

It may mean cheaper HIV drugs but i does not mean FREE anti-retrovirals. Commerce still takes priority in capitalism

same old story - yet another famine

No sooner had the U.N. announced Somalia's famine was over and another hunger crisis looms.

Last year, around 13 million people in the Horn of Africa needed food aid. Now aid agencies warn failed harvests in the Sahel mean 12 million more people require assistance.

The Sahel, the band of desert and scrub that runs south of the Sahara, stretches, west to east, from Senegal to Mauritania, Mali Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. Mauritania, a country that is three times the size of Arizona but has the smallest volume of potable water of any nation in the world, is one of the worst affected. A third of its population is already at risk of hunger.

The primary cause is a drought last year described as the worst for decades by the U.N. As a result, food prices have doubled or tripled, while the price of livestock — often the main store of wealth in the Sahel — plunged as pastures turned to desert and the animals began dying of thirst. Nor are such instances of failed rains isolated. A 2011 study by the Center for Forestry at the University of California, Berkeley, found rainfall in the Sahel has almost halved since 1954. In a region already poor and sparsely governed, the drought has intensified competition for food and water, and violent unrest — like recent intertribal battles over cattle in South Sudan — is rising. Northern Mali is currently the scene of a Tuareg rebellion, as is northern Nigeria, where an Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, is waging a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the state.

In a grain storage near Gaet Teidouma, stock manager Jeddou Ould Abdallahi looks helplessly at the few remaining sacks of cereal stacked against the whitewashed walls. There is no way they will feed hundreds of people in surrounding villages until the next harvest in September. "We are on the brink of a famine," he says.

"Within months, people will begin to starve unless we act," warns the European Union's humanitarian-aid commissioner, Kristalina Georgieva.

Johannes Schoors, country director of aid organization CARE in Niger, laments: "Certain donors still want to see dying children before they make available funds. We need to tackle the underlying causes of food insecurity; otherwise, we will face a crisis every year. But who can afford to finance that?"

Scoors is correct. Capitalism cares only for those with economic importance. Only socialism cater for peoples needs

Droughts don't inevitably mean famine. While they may set the conditions for starvation, only human beings ensure it. The world has more than enough food to feed itself.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2106546,00.html?xid=newsletter-europe-weekly

Senegal'S Class Struggle

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has served Western interests dutifully.

The changes Wade has made to the constitution, enabling his personalisation of the state, were ushered in alongside a number of other changes that served to further open the country to foreign investment.

Wade's primary skill seems to have been signing cheques to foreign companies. By far the most significant achievement for Wade has been opening up mineral exploitation in the country's Toumbacounda region, facilitated by a $527m project to build the largest port in West Africa. The port is being built in a public-private initiative with DP World - an affiliate of the Dubai World Group, a company that also took on an $800m deal to build and run a special economic zone. The port facilitates the extraction of gold by a Canadian and Saudi company, Oromin Venture Group, and two other Canadian companies; Sabodala Mining and Lamgold Group. They are joined by Jersey-based Randgold, and the multi-national Arcelor Mittal. Numerous other valuable metals are found in the area, such as copper, chromium, lithium and uranium. The quantities seem to be less significant than the rare properties they offer for blending in new metal composites. These minerals will make their way to port via massive road rehabilitation and construction projects, which have been doled out to companies such as Swiss-based SGS Industrial, and China's Henan Industrial Cooperation Group and APIX, the government investment agency. Many Senegalese find it painfully insulting that, after 50 years of independence, they still cannot even build their own roads.

Senegal has also been involved in the protracted process of privatising its water services, with an early electricity privatisation that initially involved Hydro-Quebec and later Vivendi, among others. Vivendi is the company so loathed in South Africa for its pre-paid meter system. These privatisation processes lead to rising household bills for working people whose wages have been stagnant.

Wade formed in ideological association with former South African president Thabo Mbeki's campaignaimed for Africa to undergo a renaissance that would include increasing social cohesion, democracy, economic growth and the establishment of Africa as a significant player in world affairs. The most obvious example of this has been the adoption of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a vehicle to expand the reach of neoliberal free-market economic policy throughout the continent. In short, NEPAD further opened the continent to foreign investment - enshrining property rights, treating foreign firms on par with indigenous firms, cutting taxes, enabling the expropriation of profits, creating tax-free zones, and limiting the rights of workers.

According to Senegal Interior Minister Maitre Ousmane Ngom in 2009: "On the one hand, these reforms aim at improving the business environment, and on the other hand modernising the legal framework and the geological infrastructures to attract and develop foreign direct investments." Not surprisingly, international business interests have offered significant praise for Wade’s government over the years. Ousmane boasted that the World Bank's latest "Doing Business" report ranked Senegal as the top reforming country in Africa, and the fifth in the world.

The latest World Bank data shows the current account balance of Senegal at a deficit of $1.029bn. The country exports $3.236bn (2009) and imports $5.919bn. (This inclues foreign aid and remittances.) The exports are of course much larger in actual volume, leading to more shipments leaving the country, but those exports are primary commodities. The value of goods coming in is therefore much greater and is usually manufactured, such as mobile phones, clothing and electronics - the fate of neocolonialism.

Although the global scramble for Senegalese wealth is helping to enrich foreign business and a small local functionary class, the rest of the economy has been suffering. Unemployment rates at around 48 per cent mean Senegalese workers they do so in a highly degrading degrading fashion vy with one another for jobs and wages whose purchasing power constantly diminishes. Many feel a deep sense of despair and humiliation on a daily basis. Senegal has seen a growing division of society between those who can afford pay-per-use services, and those who cannot. Toll roads and new first-class trains sweep the wealthy out to the suburbs, while the rest make their way home in apartheid-style hardship. Agriculture still provides the main source of economic activity for 77 per cent of the labour force, but it remains highly dependent on increasingly unreliable weather patterns. Local peanut production - the most significant agricultural export - has declined, in part due to the privatisation of Sonacos, the state marketing and processing company, but also as a result of changes in climate and soil health. The fishing industry faces declining stocks as foreign trawlers poach along the West African coast with impunity.

Senegalese people need to stop looking for heroic leaders. Y’en a Marre ["Had enough"] members are starting to express some dissatisfaction with the culture of the M23 opposition movement, which is dominated by figureheads, whose politics closely resemble those of President Wade and people who simply want to occupy his throne. M23 prove themselves to be and self-interested, rather than political principled. Y’en a Marre members reveal a greater interest in popular education and grassroots action. They draw inspiration from a long history of non-violent anti-colonial resistance.

Demonstrations have managed to gain significant support outside the capital, Dakar, and taken place in smaller towns throughout the country. There have been a number of labour disputes. For example, most recently, taxi and transport workers managed to stop service for a three-day period with a near-100 per cent participation rate as they protested both the rise in fuel prices and police harassment and bribery. Before that, the union at the national broadcasting corporation participated in a protest and brief labour disruption over claims that the company was being used for Wade's propaganda purposes rather than upholding standards of journalism. For the past three months, there has been a nationally coordinated strike of college and university professors who face ever-growing class sizes but cannot afford basic housing. At the same time, the opposition is nevertheless rather disconnected from the everyday struggles of working people. The demonstrations reveal no practical links with the unions leading these struggles.

Adapted from here

Congo ignored

Over the years, Congo has faced numerous problems such as grinding poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and a war in the east of the country that has dragged on for over a decade and left over 5.4 million people dead.

Congo is rich in diamonds, oil and minerals including tin, tantalum, tungsten which are widely used by the UK firms for producing mobile phones and laptops. The brutal way through which these materials are exploited, such as mass rape and the massacre of children, has led them to be dubbed as "blood minerals."

A British writer, Judith Ammanthishas, condemned the UK government for having turned a blind eye to the severe crisis taking place in the central African nation, because “The crisis in Congo is of no interest to UK government and media, and surprisingly they are happy with the violence occurring in the country. It’s quite scandalous that UK government has not addressed the Congo crises, but it is very transparent why this is happening, because it is of no interest to them whether people die or don’t die, they only consider UK’s financial interests in the region”

President Joseph Kabila has been strongly supported by the western governments, as his People's Party for Reconstruction and Democracy was responsible for militarizing the mining industry, and continued to sell off the Congolese owned mining assets to western firms, specially to UK-based mining company, Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, that has profited greatly from the situation in Congo.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/227388.html

Niger's Hunger

A national survey of vulnerable households shows that 5.4 million people face food insecurity across Niger. Women have been left in charge of many of the households in the village of Zamkoye-Koïra, in western Niger, as food shortages have driven male family members to leave in search of work elsewhere.

"The men have gone to look for a way to feed the women and children left behind in the village, because there was no harvest at all this year," 40-year-old Bibata Mounkaïla told IPS. "We've eaten only once a day for several months," the mother of eight said, in the midst of making a simple porridge out of sorghum that will have to satisfy her family for the whole day. "The situation also means that our children are no longer going to school - the nearest one is in a neighbouring village, three kilometres from here."

Poor rains resulted in a deficit of more than half a million tonnes of grain and a shortfall of fodder for livestock of more than 10 million tonnes. The vulnerability survey, carried out in December 2011, found that more than a third of the population of 15.7 million are in a position of food insecurity - 1.5 million will face severe food shortages.

According to Eric-Alain Ategbo, the chief nutrition expert for the United Nations Children's Fund office in Niamey, the Nigerien capital. some 330,000 children are facing severe malnutrition presently, and nearly 700,000 more face moderate hunger. "We have seen 20,000 cases of malnourishment across the country, with 5,000 new cases recorded each week (in medical centres)."