Malnutrition Is Ravaging Niger's Children - New York Times

World aid arriving too late to Niger...The important point is also made that most children die of chronic hunger as opposed to atimes of acute famine (which is the case for most of Africa). Also the Niger government pursued what turned out to be a disastorous policy of ruling out free food aid and health care...
Malnutrition Is Ravaging Niger's Children - New York Times: "At 16 months, he was little bigger than some newborns, with the matchstick limbs and skeletal ribs of the severely malnourished. He had died three hours earlier in the intensive care unit of a field hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, where 30 others like him still lie with their mothers on metal cots.
One in five is dying - the result, many say, of a belated response by the outside world to a disaster predicted in detail nine months ago.
Niger's latest hunger problem, like Baby Boy Saminou's tragedy, is more complex than it first appears. As aid begins to trickle into some of the nearly 4,000 villages across southern Niger that need help - the vanguard of a flood of food brought forth by television images of shrunken babies - the rich world's response to Niger's worst nutrition crisis since the 1985 famine is, in fact, proving too late for many.
Unseen on television, however, are the shrunken infants who die all but unnoticed even in so-called normal years. Of each 1,000 children born alive in this, the world's second-poorest nation, a staggering 262 fail to reach their fifth birthdays.
Five of Baby Boy Saminou's seven brothers and sisters were among them. The longest-surviving of those who died reached 4 years of age. Asked what killed the last three, Saminou's father, Saidou Ida, said simply, 'Malnutrition.'
International aid officials and charity workers here say that the world's dilatory reaction to Niger's woes is hard to excuse. Some of them also say that Niger's miseries this year are merely a worsened version of its perennial ones - and that until Niger addresses its problems of primitive farming, primitive health care and primitive social conditions, infants will continue to die unnoticed in numbers that dwarf any human emergency.

"That is the bigger question that both Niger and the international community, everyone, needs to answer," Marcus Prior, the West Africa spokesman for the World Food Program, said in an interview in Maradi, the regional city where little Saminou died. "We feel that we've tried to raise awareness. But at the same time, this is something that's a recurring problem."

That it is a perennial problem, Mr. Prior and others stress, in no way minimizes the urgency of Niger's current disaster - erratic rainfall and severe food shortages in the agricultural and herding belts where many of Niger's 11 million to 12 million people live.

Much of this disaster was suspected last November, when experts monitoring Niger's farms found a 220,000-ton shortfall - about 7.5 percent of the normal crop - in the harvest of grains, especially the millet that is the staple of most people's diet.

Among others, the United Nations World Food Program and Doctors Without Borders sounded alarms, and Niger's government, with World Food Program approval, quickly asked donors to give Niger 71,000 tons of food aid and $3 million for the 400,000 most vulnerable farmers and herders.

By May, it had received fewer than 7,000 tons of food and one $323,000 donation, from Luxembourg.

"I think everyone knew that a crisis was going on," said Johanne Sekkenes, the Niger mission head of Doctors Without Borders, in an interview in Niamey, the capital. "But the answer given at the time, from governments and international agencies in Niger, was that the ongoing, normal development programs should be reinforced."

Niger's government ruled out both free food aid and health care to hungry families, preferring to sell surplus millet at subsidized prices in an effort to force the price of scarce millet down. But millet prices skyrocketed, forcing families to sell cattle and other goods to buy food...