A Voice from the Field
Stefanie Savariaud is an information officer with the UN World Food Program (WFP). She spoke to NetAid by telephone from the WFP office in Niamey, the capital of Niger.
Can you describe the situation on the ground in Niger?
Well, the situation is still critical, especially for children under five. They are the ones you've seen in all of the pictures—and they are the ones that are suffering the most, because they are the most vulnerable. There are some centers being set up where you see really malnourished children. Sometimes you go into one and meet a mother and her child is there; and the day after that the child is dead.
A lot of malnutrition is linked to lack of food, but it's very important to stress that this is not only about hunger. Access to health and medication is also an issue. Today I went to a center in Tillabéri—a government center. They were saying that a lot of children there die of malaria, around thirty cases a day. So it's a range of problems that are the issue; not from today, or yesterday, but problems that have always been there.
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What are some of the problems that have always been there?
The first problem is that you've got 82 percent of the population depending on food coming from their own fields. And in Niger, only 15 percent of the land is suitable for agriculture. Also, people depend on rain to water their crops. There is no other way to water their crops, given that there is no electricity or tap water or irrigation. The poor quality of water is another serious issue—it infects the children with diseases. Something else worth noting is the process of desertification and global warming—the whole region is affected by that.
What is most important to stress is that the Sahel and Sahara are regions where people are coping with very little. So when there is a shock like the drought or the locust invasion the thin line of survival gets thinner. That's how people have nothing left, because they live on very little to begin with.
The UN made repeated calls for international aid to address the crisis early on, but they were ignored. For the people who saw the famine building, how does it feel to see the international community wait for a crisis before responding?
People who have been working here for a long time say that it's extremely difficult to raise attention between crises. And here crises are recurrent, it's only more severe this time. But there are always crises and the World Food Program is constantly underfunded. It is very frustrating. We knew that the crisis was coming, and we recorded the appeals and the dates we made them.
What can young people in the U.S. do to prevent crises like the famine in Niger from occurring in the future?
What is extraordinary is that Niger is the second poorest country in the world, but until a few weeks ago, there wasn't any interest from NGOs (nongovernmental organizations). But all that has changed; now a lot of NGOs are coming in.
So the first thing is to follow what is going on in the region—to get beyond the images and understand the problems in an overall context. It's important to understand the reasons for the famine, including how people live and cope with tough conditions every day.
It's very important to deal with the emergency now, but after it has passed we should pay attention to different sectors that cause some of the problems—like lack of irrigation. I think we have to try to get the bigger the picture.
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