En ny fødevarekrise i Sahel truer. Hæren af sultne er i 2014 vokset til mere end 20 millioner. Senegal er et af de hårdt ramte lande, og her er 2,5 millioner i farezonenen. Omkring fem millioner børn under fem år i Sahel vil i år være underernæret, 1,5 millioner stærkt underernæret.
LOUGA/DAKAR, 12 March 2014 (IRIN) – The number of food insecure in the Sahel is expected to grow from 11.3 million in 2013 to more than 20 million in 2014, mainly due to an increase in cases in northern Nigeria, northern Cameroon and Senegal. IRIN went to Louga, in northern Senegal, to find out why the number of hungry is so high.
“Nothing was harvested this year in the fields. Nothing at all,” said Ndjouga Ndianye, a farmer from Diama Nguene, a village about 15km outside Louga, which is 70km southeast of Saint Louis. “In the fields, apart from peanut scraps, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
The number of food insecure in Senegal is slightly higher this year than in 2011, the year of a major drought crisis.
Rains were poor – in some cases nonexistent – in 2011, decent in 2012 and poor again in 2013, say farmers in Louga. As a result, even though families built up some stocks in 2012, they were starting this year at a deficit, and many of them were in deep debt, making them highly vulnerable when 2013’s rains came late and ended early.
This dynamic, combined with improved food security surveys that are identifying previously invisible groups of food-insecure people, has caused the number of those classified as hungry to shoot up in Senegal.
“The situation is very difficult,” said 30-year-old Fatou Ndiaye, a farmer in the Louga Region. “I have [four] young children and, every day, my children say to me, ‘Mama, I’m hungry.’ But what can I do?” she asks. “There were no harvests, so we have no sacks [of rice] this year. It’s true that every year is difficult, but this is the worst. I’m very worried what we will eat in the coming months.”
According to WFP food security assessments undertaken between June and December 2013, countrywide, 20 percent of the population, or 2.5 million people are estimated to be food insecure this year, among which 5 percent, or around 675,000 people will be severely food insecure.
Across the Sahel, as of January, more than 2.5 million people were already facing food insecurity, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports..
Conditions deteriorating
In Louga, some 33,000 residents are severely food insecure, a markedly higher number than last year, said Ingeborg Breuer, WFP head in Senegal. The harvest was 11 percent below average. “It’s quite concerning when you look at the statistics compared to last year. You clearly have a deterioration of food security in Louga.”
When they did come to Louga, the rains were intermittent. Insect infestations were also worse in 2013.
“There have always been bad years every so often, but this year is really the worst,” said Malo Niang, a farmer from Thiedy Village in Louga. “Normally, I harvest tons’ worth of peanuts and millet, but this year it was just a few sacks’ worth.”
According to Ibrahima Laye Thiome, the Disaster Management Coordinator for the Senegalese Red Cross, surveys show crop yields may last only as long as mid-March, meaning an early start to the annual lean season. Many of these same families are still trying to recover from previous food crises. “So the perspectives for this year are really quite worrying,” Breuer said.
Malnutrition set to spike
Children, too, are likely to feel the effects of the poor harvest in the coming months.
OCHA estimates that across the Sahel, five million children under the age of five will suffer from malnutrition this year, and that 1.5 million of them will suffer severe acute malnutrition. This figure remains largely unchanged from 2013, when malnutrition surveying significantly improved, and was a jump from 2012 when one million children were estimated to be severely malnourished.
Boubacar Camara, a nurse at one of the regional health clinics in Louga, said around 3 percent of the children they treat are currently moderately malnourished. This number is likely to rise in the coming months.
“There hasn’t been a sharp increase in the number of malnutrition cases yet,” he said. “But I fear it is coming soon because of last year’s poor harvests.”
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http://www.irinnews.org/report/99773/an-alarming-outlook-for-senegal-s-hungry
