Tears course from Sidi Mohammed’s protruding eyes and the frail, 12-month-old boy squirms and mewls in his mother’s arms as she tries to get him to drink from a blue plastic cup of vitamin-rich gruel that aid workers have brought to north-eastern Mali.
The aid workers say the food crisis in Mali is raging largely unnoticed by a world preoccupied with hunger in next-door Niger.
There are fears of a replay of the drama in Niger, where the world ignored repeated warnings and only rushed in when images of starving children hit the airwaves.
Across the chronically dry and dusty West African region on the edge of the Sahara, malnutrition is a yearly occurrence for many.
Poor rains and a plague of locusts last year have made the situation worse, leaving hundreds of thousands in dire need of help.
Malnourished children like Sidi and his three siblings are dangerously underfed and reliant on food aid. Burkina Faso and Mauritania also are affected.
”We had nothing to eat except the milk of our three sheep. I was very afraid. What could I do for my children?” says Sidi’s mother, 25-year-old Ahmetan Ahmedu.
In Mali, a nation of 11-million to Niger’s west, the government says about 1,5-million people are in the midst of a food crisis after their crops were wiped out and herds thinned last year, with an estimated 144 000 malnourished children on the edge in the north and east.
Mali’s difficulties aren’t believed to be as severe as Niger’s — yet. The United Nations’s World Food Programme (WFP) said on July 28 that 5 000 children in the north were suffering acute malnutrition after agricultural production was 42% lower in 2004 than the year earlier.
In the worst-affected areas, between 16% and 33% of Malian children are believed malnourished, which untreated can kill or stunt growth and cause behaviour difficulties in later years, the government and aid groups say.
The WFP said an appeal for $7,5-million was facing a shortfall of 85% and called the lack of funding for Mali ”devastating”.
A similar appeal for Niger has reached 70% of the $16-million sought, with Australia, Germany and the United States the biggest Niger donors. But the first calls for help for the entire region went out in November and the response for Niger came only in recent weeks.
Aid workers say the crisis is unfolding deep in Mali’s dusty bush, where many of Mali’s widely wandering Fulani, Tuareg and Tamachek people tend their flocks.
”The TV cameras whose horrific images of hunger in Niger caught the international community’s attention have not yet reached the affected areas of Mali,” the WFP said in a statement.
Mali’s government made its own appeal in May and started free food distributions early this year to cover partially a deficit of 347 000 tonnes of grains and other harvest goods.
But Mali’s government still says it needs 5 000 tonnes of enriched foodstuffs for very young children — always the first and worst hit during a food scarcity.
”The situation is always difficult, particularly now in the lean season” before the recently begun rains end and a new harvest can begin, says Lansry Nana Yaya Haidara, Mali’s minister for food security.
And after last year’s invasion of the yellow locusts that ate crops already hit by insufficient rains, ”it’s a particularly, particularly difficult moment”, she says in her offices in the capital, Bamako.
That all adds up to a deficit of attention and aid for Mali, says Patricia Hoorelbeke, mission chief for Niger and Mali for the French-based charity Action Contre la Faim (Action against Hunger) that provided Sidi Mohammed with his food.
”If there’s a forgotten crisis, it’s here,” she says of Mali. ”Here you always have a problem, but this year it’s three or four times worse.”
”We have a grave crisis, and the world needs to react immediately.”
Action Contre la Faim, along with a few other organisations including Britain’s Oxfam, has been working for weeks to get food into communities in the north near the fabled trans-Saharan way station of Timbuktu and in the east, near the city of Gao.
In the markets near Gao, food is scarce and demand high. Prices have skyrocketed for people who have little. At Gao’s hospital, about 20 severely malnourished children are being treated, with two already dead, aid workers say.
In villages like Masri — 80km down a sandy track from the tarred road that ends at Gao — aid workers give malnourished children like Sidi green bracelets to identify them and give their parents food.
Among the population near Masri, a village of about 40 families, about one in five children checked has been determined malnourished, Action Contre la Faim says.
Around the settlement of semi-nomadic Tamachek people and their huts of dried grass, deeply impoverished children wander naked, their bellies protruding, their skin gray and their faces gaunt.
In villages near Gao, aid workers say, the camels are skinny and the occasional sheep carcass dries in the harsh sun as village elders fret for their young.
”This year, everyone is having problems,” says Ahmed Abdoulaye, the 38-year-old father of Youssouf Ahmed, 13 months old and malnourished, but smiling widely after a few meals of emergency food aid. — Sapa-AP
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