Starving season

World hunger is by far the worst crisis humanity faces, and it's getting worse -- especially in Africa. Until the West overcomes its apathy and works toward long-term solutions, millions of people -- many of them children -- will continue to die unnecessarily.

By Samuel Loewenberg

Read more: Politics, News, Darfur

Photo by Samuel Loewenberg

One of the 200 mothers who trudged hours through the desert to come to this emergency feeding center run by the British charity Islamic Relief.

June 13, 2006 | In a dust-blown clinic on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, scores of women crowd into a bunkerlike structure, clutching children with emaciated limbs and listless eyes. They have come to have their babies weighed. It is a tradition known to every parent. Here, the tradition has become a nightmare.

The medical staff take an infant named Bintow from the arms of his mother and place him in a black harness attached to a hand-held scale. He shrieks at the sudden discomfort, thrashing his arms and legs. His stomach bulges, all of his ribs are visible. The child is 10 months old. He weighs 9 pounds.

Bintow is lucky, as far as it goes. He is so badly underweight that he will receive an emergency ration: two weeks' worth of enriched cornmeal and oil. Only a third of the estimated 200 children at the center that day will receive care. There is simply not enough to go around.

"People get upset, but we can only help a few of them," said the head of the feeding center, Ibrahim Chalaré of the British charity Islamic Relief. Like most aid organizations, his center depends on international donors to feed the hungry children waiting outside. They do not have nearly enough. The numbers coming to the center have already doubled from the month before, he said.

Nearly 3 million of Niger's 12 million people currently face acute malnutrition. Most of them are children. In some areas, emergency feeding centers are already admitting 1,000 children a week. Childhood hunger is a perennial problem in this landlocked country on the southwestern edge of the Sahara; however, it is very unusual to be seeing so many acute cases so close to the harvest season. The hunger season has come early.

This will be news to most Americans, who, if they've heard of Niger at all, know it only for its unwitting role in last year's "Plamegate" scandal. The West African nation, one of the poorest in the world, made a rare media appearance after the Bush administration claimed -- falsely -- in the run-up to the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium there.

Today, despite the looming food shortages, Niger has passed again into obscurity.

In fact, the current crisis is a holdover from last summer, when images of starving babies from Niger were seen briefly on television screens across the U.S. and Britain. The ongoing hunger crisis in Niger is not due to war, a crazed dictator or a natural catastrophe. The problem is more straightforward: prolonged and severe poverty. This means that even a relatively small shock can leave millions on the verge of disaster. That is what happened in 2005, when a mild drought and locust infestation left more than 4 million people facing death and debilitating malnutrition. Aid agencies had been warning of an approaching hunger crisis for six months beforehand, but it wasn't until the correct visuals were displayed -- pictures of starving babies -- that the world took notice and the U.S. and other rich countries suddenly started sending money and food.

But a month later, Hurricane Katrina knocked Niger out of the news cycle. The donations disappeared as quickly as they'd arrived.

Call it the 15-minutes-of-fame cycle of starvation.

Severely weakened and indebted from last summer's near-famine, millions of rural people -- especially children under 5 -- are once again in dire straits. Both American and European aid officials saw it coming but did little to stop it. By this May, the United Nations' emergency food agency, the World Food Programme, had collected only $14 million of the $37.3 million necessary to continue its feeding programs. Now this year has brought more drought, crop failure and famine. "Children are already falling into acute malnutrition. The aid money and food will arrive too late," said Johanne Sekkenes, who heads the Medecins Sans Frontieres operation in Niger. Last year, MSF had its largest infant therapeutic feeding program ever in Niger -- a striking fact, given that the organization usually operates in war and disaster zones.

Next page: It's worse for a starving child to live in a country at peace, because war-torn countries attract most of the funding