Africa's Sahel region stalked by hunger
The Economic Community of West African States, a regional group of 15 countries, has sent a distress call to the international community declaring that more than 6 million people, including one million children, are at risk of hunger in the Sahel region of Africa.
The distress call was issued at the end of a two-day, high-level meeting in Lome Tuesday to address the issue of food security in the Sahel region, especially Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad, according to CNN.
"The situation is very alarming in the Sahel and, if nothing is done, millions may die from hunger," Niger's minister for food security, Amadou Diallo was quoted as saying.
Spiraling food prices, failed harvests and the fall-out of the conflict in Mali have led to the desperate situation.
Many families have been forced to sell their livestock to buy food, while others are eating seeds instead of saving them for sowing in the next season.
According to a World Bank report of May 31, more than 17 million people are facing possible starvation in Sahel region. The crisis is due to a combination of drought caused by poor rainfall in 2011, too little food, high grain prices, environmental damage and large numbers of internal refugees, it said.
The conflicts in Mali and Niger have forced over 300,000 people to flee from their homes with many escaping to refugee camps in neighboring countries, the report said.
This has worsened an already difficult situation and put several thousand people at risk of malnutrition.
Adama Coulibaly, Regional Director for Plan in West Africa, said the "dual crises across the West African Sahel region - food and refugees - are positioned to claim more lives over time than the Asian Tsunami with 273,000 dead or the Haitian Earthquake with more than 217,000 dead."
"Death from the complications of hunger and malnutrition is a slow, painful process."
As an emergency response to the crisis, the West African community has released a package of $80 million -- one tenth of the estimated total need of $800 million.
Source: The Africa News.Net
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