War and Hunger - The Scourge of the Sahel

20 million "food insecure" people across Africa's Sahel belt, an impoverished area that includes Sudan and Central African Republic. An estimated 2.5 million people out of those affected need urgent humanitarian assistance just to survive. 5 million children under five years old are classified as acutely malnourished in the Sahel belt.

"The situation for countless communities across the region... is still desperate," the OCHA factsheet says. "People are highly vulnerable to disease and epidemics, and because health infrastructure is so limited, many people die of illnesses that they should survive."

UN Regional Humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel Robert Piper told the Reuters news agency that the region now faces "make or break time".

In south-east Niger, for example, a convergence of floods, droughts and conflict in neighbouring Nigeria means that people near the town of Diffa cannot grow enough food to get by.

While the Sahel belt often sees floods, droughts, locust infestations and epidemics, it has also been hit more recently by conflicts in several countries including Nigeria, South Sudan and Central African Republic. Across the Sahel, more than 1.2 million people have had to flee violence and insecurity, with most of them crossing into neighbouring countries as refugees where they place further strain on already limited resources.

From here 

More Food But More Hungry

 Around 16 million people are at risk of going hungry across Africa's Sahel belt next year due to conflicts and rapid population growth, even though the region expects good harvests and rainfall, a senior U.N. official said . Approximately 2 million have already crossed the emergency threshold and need immediate food assistance

Food insecurity in the Sahel next year will increase by 40 percent compared to this year when 11.3 million people had inadequate food and required around $1.7 billion in donor assistance, according to preliminary OCHA data.

"These are the first indicators that the Sahel crisis is getting away from us," said Robert Piper, OCHA coordinator for the Sahel."The numbers are getting bigger even though the harvest this year has been fractionally better than the average over the last five years. Rapid population growth has meant the same amount of food has to feed more mouths. So despite a small increase in overall food production, on average there is 13 percent less food per person," Piper explained. 

Nigeria and Senegal recorded the biggest jump in food insecurity numbers, reporting an increase from 44,000 to 2.4 million and 700,000 to 2.2 million, respectively, said Piper "Food insecurity in Nigeria is partly to do with the conflict in the north, which has been exacerbated since the government called the state of emergency in May,” He went on to say  "However, we need to better understand what went wrong in Senegal. Uneven rainfall patterns, high prices and a poor harvest are part of the explanation. But high food insecurity in the Casamance suggests that the conflict might still impacting,” said Piper.

The Blooming of the Sahel

Climate change is expected to hit Africa hardest.  It is increasingly likely that scientific warnings that the world could warm by 2°C in the next 20 or 30 years will come true.  In such a case, pastoralism will be imperiled.  The effects on the African continent will be dramatically more devastating under a warming scenario of 4°C.

Over the centuries, some 16 million pastoralists have perfected the art of survival in the Sahel, raising sheep and livestock in some of the most harsh and unforgiving environments anywhere on the planet.  Meat yields from the Sahel rival those from some of the best ranches in Australia and the United States.  Currently, half of the meat and two-thirds of the milk produced and consumed in the countries of West Africa originates in the Sahel.

Farming is  the dominant industry in the region, which accounts for one-third and more of all economic output in the Sahel. This in turn empowers the women of the Sahel, as women account for the majority of Africa’s farmers. Supporting pastoralism with more climate smart-policies; reducing vulnerability to drought, flooding and other disasters; and raising more healthy livestock through timely vaccines, are all necessary to help communities adapt to the ecological harshness of the Sahel.

However pastoralism is facing multiple threats. Rapid population growth, conflict, volatile food prices, animal diseases, and shrinking grazing areas and water resources are steadily jeopardizing the survival of the pastoralists of the Sahel.  

Sahel’s vast water resources are largely untapped.  In a region where farming is the predominant economic activity, sadly, only 20 percent of the Sahel’s irrigation potential has been developed.  Worse still, one quarter of the area equipped with irrigation lies in a state of disrepair.

Bringing more water to parched lands in the Sahel will not only improve food production but place more food on family dinner tables...Climate-smart agriculture can increase yields... help protect biodiversity, improve soil fertility, and conserve the environment.

Makhtar Diop,
World Bank Group’s Vice President for Africa

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