Niger Aid Begins to Trickle In, but Many Still Wait in Hunger

The thatched-roof huts where villagers store grain for the lean season are empty. The only meal of the day is acacia leaves boiled into a thick paste, eaten in the evening in hopes it will lull the children to sleep.

After months of repeated pleas from the United Nations, international aid is starting to trickle into the West African nation of Niger. But it has yet to reach villages like Dan Mallam, 400 miles east of the capital, Niamey, where the hungry can do little but wait for help and the next harvest.

“Everything that the stomach can contain, we eat.... Anything that can calm the hunger,” said Ibrahim Koini, whose gray beard and emaciated frame make him look much older than his 45 years. “We’ve come to eat the same leaves we give our cows.”

Last year’s locust invasion and subsequent drought left 2.5 million people in Niger in desperate need of food.

The same problems are also affecting more than 1.6 million people in nearby Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania, the U.N. said Monday.

U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland warned last week that 150,000 of the 800,000 malnourished children in Niger would die unless food got to them soon. He blamed the international community for ignoring pleas for aid since November that he said could have prevented the “acute humanitarian crisis” and deaths in one of the world’s poorest countries.

In response to the crisis, the U.S. Agency for International Development is to announce today that the United States is giving more than $6 million for additional emergency food aid and to set up a program to fight child malnutrition, said Richard Grenell, spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations. Washington has provided more than $4.6 million in food assistance to Niger so far this year, he said.

In neighboring Mali, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said an estimated 1.1 million people would need food aid this year. About 5,000 children in the north are already suffering from acute malnutrition, and infant mortality in some areas has reached record levels, the agency said.

In northern Burkina Faso, about 500,000 people are in need of food, and many have left their homes in search of something to eat, the agency said. The food situation is also deteriorating throughout Mauritania, it said.

The U.N. agency’s appeal for $196 million for West Africa for 2005 -- which includes Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania -- has received just 39% of the requested funds, spokeswoman Kristen Knutson said.