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NIAMEY, Niger — Outside the state food warehouses here, women sift in the dirt for spilled grains of rice. Seven hundred miles to the east, mothers pluck bitter green berries and boil them for hours in an attempt to feed their children. In urban slums and desert villages, one word is on all lips: famine. Once again Niger is facing a food crisis, a grimly familiar predicament in a vast desert country with an explosive birthrate and rudimentary agriculture. Rains and crops failed last year — rainfall was about 70 percent below normal in the region — and now half the population of 15 million faces food shortages, officials say. Thus it was in 2005, 1985 and 1974.
But there is a big difference this year: the new military government here is acknowledging serious hunger, trying to do something about it — and asking for help. Before the country’s autocratic president, Mamadou Tandja, was overthrown in February, the state warehouses remained stocked, despite the people’s need for help. Now they are largely empty of grain, a sign of how much has been distributed in recent weeks. The new prime minister travels the suffering countryside, asking about the food shortage. Before, Mr. Tandja would fly into a rage at the very mention of the word famine, according to officials and newspapers here. And when John Holmes, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator, flew in last week, his extensive caravan received a military and police escort. Though Mr. Holmes was inquiring about what had been one of Niger’s most politically delicate topics, chronic hunger, government ministers with retinues of functionaries barreled into the dusty villages with him, and everywhere he went he was treated like a visiting head of state.
In the 2005 famine, by contrast, United Nations agencies were accused by Mr. Tandja of collaborating with the opposition to discredit him. “Before, we didn’t speak about famine; it was forbidden,” said Idrissa Kouboukoye, head of the Niger Foodstuffs Agency office at the edge of town here. He chuckled softly, noting that this year, sacks of grain started to be dispensed from the massive concrete warehouses behind him on March 1, less than two weeks after Mr. Tandja was deposed. “When people who don’t have enough to eat have to say that everything is fine, this is a problem,” Mr. Kouboukoye said of the previous government.
Mr. Tandja, an ardent nationalist, had participated in the 1974 coup that was precipitated in part by that year’s famine. But four years ago, while tens of thousands of children suffering from acute malnutrition flooded centers staffed by Doctors Without Borders, Mr. Tandja’s regime accused journalists covering the issue of not being patriotic. This year, one of the military junta’s first pronouncements was on the looming food crisis. “There’s no comparison,” said Dr. Mamadou Yami Chegou, director of nutrition at the health ministry, while attending a food distribution in the village of Koleram, in Niger’s stricken east. “The political will to address this has been clearly declared. Before, there was a silence surrounding the question.” Nobody now disputes the seriousness of Niger’s current crisis, though officials say the worst may yet be to come as the period lengthens between last year’s crop failure and the fall harvest. “The situation is not catastrophic yet,” said Mr. Holmes, after a day of visiting hungry villages hundreds of miles from here.
At the edge of Niamey, the capital, mud-brick compounds are full of food refugees from the north. “There’s almost nothing left,” said Ramatou Bubacar, 42, who had brought her seven children down from the Tillabéri department 12 days before, hoping the city would be kinder. “Everything’s been eaten.” Thousands of children are being pulled out of schools because parents have left their villages to search for food, and a handful have closed. “Exceptionally, this year, we’ve had this departure,” said Salissou Hachimou, the director of the school in Kongomé, where 43 out of 232 children have left. In the countryside, ribs poke from under the taut skin of livestock. The animal fodder supply is 66 percent below normal. Mangy camels range, nuzzling the denuded tops of trees. About 12 percent of the country’s children are acutely malnourished, according to Unicef. A handful of tiny babies with feeble limbs populated a ward in an intensive nutrition clinic in the desert town of Tanout. But the atmosphere was calm and the clinic was not overwhelmed, as Mr. Holmes noted.
The arid region was 11,000 tons short of its expected cereal production last year. The crop failed entirely in the village of Dalli. “Yes, I am hungry now,” said Safia Joulou, 26, who prepares one meal per day, boiling leaves gathered in the endless surrounding sand and scrub. Like others interviewed, she has a large family to care for, seven children. The young mother standing next to her, Nana Boukari, 20, has five. A woman questioned by the Mr. Holmes in Dalli, Maria Ali, 52, has 10. Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, has the highest birthrate in the world in some estimates and is near the top in others, greatly contributing to the country’s chronic food problems. In the regional capital of Zinder, south of Tanout, there are billboards for the local brand of condom, but there is nothing like a vigorous family planning effort in this Muslim country. The “overwhelming cultural attitude” militates against it, Mr. Holmes said. He said he brought up family planning in meetings with high government officials here. “They are aware of it as an issue, but it’s not at the top of their agenda,” he said. In Dalli, the grain in a recent free distribution was quickly exhausted. “The children don’t eat before they go to school,” said Ms. Ali, the mother of 10. “During school breaks, the children come home, but they find nothing to eat.”
