Niger accused aid agencies such as the World Food Programme of exaggerating the threat of severe food shortages next year to boost their funds and threatened to expel any organisation operating without government blessing. Health Minister Ary Ibrahim said reports of a looming crisis were aimed at harming Niger, after a World Food Programme dossier warned last week that millions of people could face severe food shortages if donor countries let aid funding slip.

Niger faces a second food crisis in the coming months unless the international community renews its efforts to help, the UN food agency (WFP) has warned. Many children remain malnourished and despite recent harvests, cereal stocks in many homes are low, it said. "It will take only the slightest adversity to push families over the edge again," said a WFP spokesman.

"Civil society in Niger imposed itself as a key actor, henceforth unavoidable within the dialogue with the government," says the national GCAP Coordinator. Follow the link for a Q & A with the GCAP Coordinator in Niger, who argues that the role of GCAP is important not only to raise awareness, but because it also puts pressure on government leaders, the political community at large and the United Nations.

Economic growth will not materialise if people are hungry and the international community needs to emphasise the importance of agriculture in Africa and adopt strategies to build this capability rather than solely emphasising industrial growth. This is according to a paper from the All Party Parliamentary Group for Debt, Aid and Trade, which discusses some of the reasons for continued famine in Africa, with a focus on Niger. The paper says IMF policies of slashing subsidies for agricultural inputs will hinder development. Subsidy reform is another key criteria - abolishing rich-country agricultural subsidies would result in a 13 per cent rise in GDP per person in Africa, says the report. "The developed world should seriously question the impact that its own economic protectionism has on Africa's poor and recognise that they are a significant contributor to poverty and food insecurity. Developed countries must implement their own economic reform for the sake of Africa's long- term food security."

The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned the jail sentence given to a magazine journalist who reported on alleged corruption in the distribution of food aid during this year's famine in Niger. On September 27, a court in the northern town of Agadez convicted Abdoulaye Harouna, publication director of the monthly Echos Express, of defaming the local governor, Yahaya Yendaka. The court sentenced him to four months in jail and fined him 520,000 CFA francs (US$950).

Large numbers of children have died as a result of the food crisis in Niger which began early this year, an aid agency estimates. France's Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) says the death rate is several times over the international emergency level. On average more than 40 young children have been dying a day in one area surveyed in the east of the country.

Drought and famine are not normal conditions for any group of human beings, but what is normal is people in the west being lied to about the causes, writes Judith Amanthis, who lists various IMF policies as being responsible for the food crisis in Niger.

The IMF and the World Bank, and the EU as well, are killing Africans in their thousands in Niger, Mali and throughout the Sahel region of Africa. By August this year in Niger alone, three million are threatened with death from starvation. Up to 800,000, especially children, have already died. Niger is the second most impoverished country on this earth. Starvation, according to one aid agency, is normal there.

Drought and locusts destroyed crops, it's true, but the rains were down only 11% from normal. There is some food in Niger. The problem is that large numbers of people, especially in the rural areas, are just too poor to buy it when their crops fail. Why? First, subsistence farming in Africa doesn't bring in much money, or any money. It has no western financial backers. Second, in March 2005 the Niger government, having secured Highly Indebted Poor Country status for Niger, implemented an IMF condition on further loans: it put a 19% VAT on basic grains whose price had risen by up to 89% over the past five years. Traders naturally sell to the highest bidder. In this case they sold grains to other West African countries. The free market knows no borders, colonial or otherwise.

Many of the rural people in the Sahel region are nomadic livestock farmers. In Niger the market in livestock has slumped. Farmers who would have sold cattle and other stock to bring in money to buy food are now unable to sell starving animals on a glutted market where prices have fallen by 25% over the past five years. Many villages are now almost entirely women, children and the old, because the men have gone to the urban areas or other African countries in search of food, work and money. African women and children are as usual forced onto the front line.

But the western picture of starving peasant women and their children is one-sided. In March hungry women and men in Niamey, Maradi and Tahoua came out in protest against food prices. Placards read, 'We're hungry. Help us'. So there are angry urban dwellers and workers as well, who are well-organised and prepared to risk imprisonment - the government's response to the protest, according to one source - to get what they need. The pattern is similar throughout Africa. The people's struggle to survive and pressurise their governments into acting for them rather than for the western powers gets left out of the news altogether.

One of the IMF's most shocking acts of war against Africans in Niger has been to demand another condition on aid: the sale of emergency grain reserves. Over the past five years, this policy has contributed to famines in other parts of Africa, notably Malawi in 2002 and again this year. In fact famine stalks large swathes of central Africa. The rationale? Cheap grain is not to flood the market before harvest time. For this reason, the Niger government’s ‘cheap’ grain came on the market too late and too expensive.

Long term drought and famine can never be normal for any group of human beings. What is normal is people in the west being lied to about the causes of Africans' suffering and what Africans are doing about it.

Western oil and forestry companies who have created climate change are as implicated as well. Western Europe and the US are responsible for 50% of the world's carbon emissions, and forestry multinationals are destroying the earth's 'lungs', including the great Congo River Basin forest, at 26 hectares a minute (37 football pitches). Greater heat and erratic rain in the Sahel region means the Sahara Desert is creeping south. Areas like northern Nigeria and Senegal are drying up as well. In erratic weather, locusts breed more heavily, but since the mid 1980s, the West African regional organisation, OCALAV, which was set up at independence in the early 1960s to control locust swarms and other plagues has been restructured. Its funding has been cut. African governments which have restructured entire economies to make life easier for multinationals can no longer pay for services vital to the people's survival.

These same governments - eight throughout the Sahel and West Africa - have welcomed US military personnel into their armies so that young African men can be trained to protect western imperialism in the 'war on terror'.

As for cross border and selective use of pesticides, first, it's unaffordable by African governments, and second, it's unmanageable. Inter-governmental co-operation has broken down in the age of G8 grotesqueries. Live 8 put money in western multinational and individual bank accounts, period. Killing locusts at the hopper stage, before they take flight - often across colonial borders – and devour people's crops, is essential. Whatever the pros and cons of using pesticides to control locust swarms, ordinary Africans have, over a period of hundreds of years, had control of their environment stolen from them, and with genocidal consequences.

In June this year, President Tanja of Niger met with George Bush. As well as the Sahel region’s strategic importance in the ‘war on terror’, Niger is the world’s third largest uranium exporter. A new generation nuclear arsenal is in the US pipeline and Tanja is handing Africa’s uranium to US arms manufacturers on a plate.

In early August, Tanja was vilified in the western media for denying that millions of people were starving and for complaining that only a fraction of the promised aid from the west had arrived. At the same time the UN congratulated the government of Mali for dealing better with the imminent death by starvation of millions more Africans. The argument is clear: if some African governments are efficient enough to keep the lid on wholesale famine, the problem must be down to an individual, to who holds presidential office. What wasn't mentioned was that the free food handed out by the UN and the government to people in Mali was, according to a BBC World Service report, only obtainable in one particular area if you worked for an Oxfam water development project. The reporter asked a woman who was digging a hole to conserve rain water if she was happy to be getting food. She and everyone else working with her laughed uproariously.

* This article is from Kilombo, the African Liberation Support Campaign Network's journal.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Aid agencies handing out emergency food in Niger are urging donors to keep the contributions flowing, so help won’t fizzle out just as Nigeriens begin to rebuild their livelihoods and their means to avert deadly food shortages in the future. The World Food Programme (WFP) is appealing to the international community not to turn away from Niger, after donations suffered a sharp drop from almost daily pledges during July to just three in the past fortnight.

This Humanitarian Policy Group briefing note highlights some of the questions that will need to be answered in order to explain the slowness of the international response to the 2005 famine in Niger. It argues that this is not just a case of donors failing to provide resources quickly enough. Questions also need to be asked about the quality of early- warning and assessment analysis; the capacity of humanitarian actors to respond; the appropriateness of the proposed responses; and the preparedness of development actors for what should have been a predictable crisis. In addition to all of these questions, the authors highlight that the scale and extent of food insecurity and possible crises in Mali and Mauritania must continue to be closely monitored.

Every day, Minta, a 40 year-old mother of six, fetches water for the household, does the laundry in the river, labours on her millet farm and, if there is food, prepares the family meals before collapsing into bed, exhausted. But during this particularly difficult lean season, there is no food, and the daily grind has become even more unbearable. With her youngest child wasting away from hunger, Minta has had to walk three hours in the scorching sun on an empty stomach in the hope of getting some food aid.

British aid agency Oxfam said on Wednesday that donors should act now to help more than a million people facing food shortages in Mali. Mali's neighbour Niger grabbed headlines in the past month after drought and locusts ravaged last October's harvest, leaving an estimated 3.6 million people short of food and threatening the lives of tens of thousands of children.

As the first shipments of emergency aid reached feeding centres in Niger, accusations are mounting that economic policies imposed on the country from outside contributed to the food shortages affecting up to three million people. Some aid specialists blamed the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Their economic programmes have contributed to sharp rises in the prices of staples such as sorghum and millet. Others said the Niamey government had downplayed the emergency to protect local food traders who are resistant to free aid because it undermines markets.

With a BBC film crew in Niger broadcasting images of starving children to the world, food aid shipments to the country are starting to pick up. But UN under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs Jan Egeland, who has repeatedly warned of neglected emergencies in African countries, told reporters that if donors had responded to earlier appeals, a child's life could have been saved for little more than a dollar a day. Now the estimated cost has risen to 80 times that, and for many it is too late. The latest edition of the AfricaFocus Bulletin reports on the crisis in Niger and contains the most recent update on Niger from the Food and Agriculture Organization, and excerpts from the May 19 consolidated UN appeal with additional background.

Tension eased in Niger on Tuesday as leaders of a three-week-old protest movement against a new tax on basic foodstuffs called off a 24-hour general strike in the interests of peace. Saouna Inoussa, a spokesman for the alliance of 30 civil society groups calling itself the Coalition Against Costly Living, said the stoppage had been suspended “to create an atmosphere of détente”.

On 29 March 2005, Moussa Tchangari, director of the Alternative Media Group, was jailed at the Penal Camp in Daikaina, located about 160km from Niamey. Tchangari, who was charged on two counts of "undermining the authority of the state and calling for an unarmed gathering", is also the communications secretary for the Democratic Coalition of the Civil Society of Niger (CDSCN), one of the organisations calling for the withdrawal of a value added tax imposed on food products, water and electricity earlier this year.

Niger has jailed five leaders of recent protests against a new tax on basic food stuffs, and has charged them with plotting against the state and forming an unauthorised association, government officials said on Wednesday. The five were members of the “Coalition Against Costly Living,” an alliance of civil society groups that has staged two major protests so far this month against the government's imposition of a 19 percent value added tax (VAT) on basic foodstuffs and other essentials of life.

Authorities in Niger have arrested three leaders of a group that has been protesting about a tax on basic foods stuffs on the grounds that they were plotting against the state, a government spokesman said on Friday. Spokesman Ben Omar told IRIN that the three men were picked up after going on private radio and television channels and urging Muslin and Christian leaders to hold prayers on Friday and over the Easter weekend to save the country from misery.

Thousands of protesters in Niger have demonstrated outside parliament against rising prices - some calling for the president's resignation. They were complaining about tax increases of nearly 20% imposed in January on basic commodities.

President Mamadou Tandja has won a second five-year term in office, becoming Niger's first head of state to secure re-election as the arid landlocked country enters a new era of political stability.
Full story: http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=44576

BACKGROUND BRIEFING: During virtually its whole independent existence, Niger has see-sawed between fragile democratic governments, whose stability has depended on their varying ability to incorporate representatives of the country's ethnic patchworks, and military dictatorships of varying shades of authoritarianism. Niger has never had what could be termed a totalitarian or overwhelmingly repressive government. Yet at the same time none of the military or civilian administrations could be said to have satisfactorily guaranteed civic rights and freedoms. Read this election briefing on the Niger elections from the Centre for Democracy and Development by clicking on the link below.

Cultural norms dictate that girls should get married early in Niger: according to various surveys, the average age for marriage amongst females in Niger is 13. As a result, many find themselves giving birth before they have properly left childhood behind themselves. But when children give birth to children, complications ensue - not least those created by obstetric fistulas. But, what of the men who allow this condition to persist by marrying girls who are too young? If prevention is better than cure, are efforts underway to alter their perceptions about the age at which is it acceptable for girls to be married?