While We Waste Tonnes...
He spent six years in the Iraq Army. He saw his colleagues die every day. He held his friends’ heads in his hands while they gasped their last few breaths looking up to him for help. Dr Abdul Naser H Huaidi, an Iraqi, thought he had seen it all.
Until he volunteered to go to Niger to try and help few of the millions that are on the brink of starvation in the severely drought-hit desert country in western Africa.
“It shook me up,” said Dr Huaidi, a volunteer with Qatar Red Crescent (QRC), a charitable organization which has set up two therapeutic feeding centers in the cities of Zinder and Tanout.
“There were children dying. Mothers begging for help, helplessly watching us help a few, as many as we could, while their own kids were dying on their shoulders,” Dr Huaidi, who joined QRC in 2003, said on his return to Qatar after his two-month long stay in the landlocked African country situated south east of Algeria. “It’s frustrating,” he said.
While here in Qatar, on an average we waste some 800,000 kg of food every single day, about 3.6mn people, out of the total population of 12mn, in around 3000 villages of Niger are facing acute food shortage.
2.5mn of them, including about 150,000 children, suffer from severe malnutrition and are considered “extremely vulnerable.”
“A 14-month-old kid,” Dr Huaidi said, holding out his palm to show the size, “weighed just two kilos.”
“The kid had not eaten for God alone knows how many days.”
The cause of the nutrition crisis in the country, ranked the second poorest in the world, has been a prolonged drought and locust infestation that has destroyed crops and livestock across Niger, 85% of the population of which survives on agriculture.
Children are dying daily in the few feeding centers there are, where their place in the queue could make the difference between life and death.
It is estimated that one out of four children in Niger dies before its fifth birthday.
The two QRC feeding centers, which have treated 336 cases of acute malnutrition ever since they set up end of June, can accommodate only about 200 children each at a time.
“Children are admitted depending upon their mean weight. We admit the most serious ones first. Once they are discharged we provide the entire family with 100 kgs of food, which would last them for a while, and then we give them another 100 kgs,” Dr Huaidi said.
This QRC relief operation, which will continue till the year end, is likely to cost QR3.65mn.
“It’s disheartening,” Dr Huaidi said, “to send back hungry people from the feeding centers without treatment. But we can’t help it. We can only help a few.”
He said once hundreds of starving people broke through the feeding center’s gates screaming for help. “What do you do when you see that? You feel so helpless,” he said.
Dr Huaidi said those that could not be admitted into the two QRC feeding centers, which have just two doctors each, were advised “some medicines and some other feeding centers” where they could go and try their luck.
Inside the center, seeing children screaming and yelling, the feeling is harrowing, he added. They’re screaming because they’re hungry and ridden with diseases – everything from cholera to malaria to pneumonia.
The QRC is aware what its doing for the people of Niger is just a drop in the ocean. “We are trying to play our part, doing as much as we can. Hopefully, looking at us, several other people will try and play their part as well,” said QRC assistant secretary general Saleh Ali al-Muhanadi, at a press conference recently.
The UN World Food Program said it needed about $30mn to feed the hungry in Niger. So far it has a commitment from donor nations of just $9mn.
Aid workers in the country, situated on the Sahara’s southern fringe, say donors see no interest in investing or putting in more donations due to the “lack of incentive”.
“The donors, the international community, they don’t even know where Niger is,” Johanne Sekkenes of Medical Sans Frontiers (MSF), one of the active medical charities in Niger, was quoted as saying in an agency report.
“Children are dying of hunger today,” she said from Niamey, the capital. “The problem is that nobody cares. The big donors accept this unacceptable situation in Niger.”
Niger, which apart from uranium has precious few resources, had simply failed to attract the kind of sustained food and agricultural aid necessary over the years to drag itself out of a permanent hand-to-mouth existence, Sekkenes said.
It is worth noting that Niger is the third largest uranium producer, yet most of the revenues of this lucrative trade accrue to the Western military industrial complex involved in the production of nuclear weapons.
International charity World Vision’s Emmanuel Isch said it had been difficult to get the world’s attention. “Even six months ago as we were doing assessments, we saw the situation,” he said.
“A food crisis is a slow onset situation, it’s not like a natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane that hits really suddenly and the media attention is focused on it. So it’s difficult to get support,” said Suzanne Charest of the Canadian Red Cross.
The UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egelad, talking to BBC accused the international community of reacting slowly to the crisis, which was widely predicted after last year’s poor harvests.
But initial food appeals went largely unheeded.
Needy families, scattered across the semi-arid south of the country, are roaming the parched desert looking for help.
One family, a set of journalists came across, did not even know where they were going.
“I’m wandering like a madman,” the father told them. “I’m afraid we’ll all starve.”
They were “hundreds of miles from the nearest food distribution point.”
Oxfam, another charity, said families were feeding their children “grass and leaves” to keep them alive.
According to a UNIRIN report, the problem was not a lack of food nationally. Total grain production last year – though dipping below a five-year average – was 22% more than the 2000/2001 season, a year in which “there was no major food security crisis,” the report said.
“What has changed this year is that in some parts of a southern belt sweeping from the border with Burkina to Chad, food prices are critically high, while the value of livestock has crashed.”
A 100kg bag of millet, the staple grain, sold for around $16 to $24 last year but now costs $44.
The famine in Niger is attributable to high retail prices and a lack of purchasing power. It is also accompanied by a crisis of the livestock economy, which has received virtually “no support from the government,” the report said.
After the news cameras are switched off and the world’s journalists and charities leave Niger, what is almost certain is that next season the poor will again suffer the pain of hunger and the weakest children will die.
“In any given year, in any given village, you will find malnourished children in Niger,” said a US-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) report.
A US-based CNN journalist based in Niger said: “For a journalist who has covered refugee camps across Africa – from Darfur, Sudan, to Eastern Congo to Liberia – each time there is the haunting feeling of a desperate child staring up at you with big, brown eyes.”
“The feeling is one of helplessness, but there is nothing one can do. We’re just here to tell the story. But at the end of the day, the experience is heart-wrenching and very draining.”
Even QRC has its limitations. Most likely the charity will close down relief operations in December this year. At least that’s the plan.
“We need money to go on,” Dr Huaidi said. “We need more doctors. Two doctors are not enough for 200 people.”
“But who would want to leave this cushy life in Qatar and go and serve people in Africa?”
Really, who? Except a few like Dr Huaidi or Dr Salam Anwar Hussein, still in Niger, who don’t expect a monthly salary for everything they do in their lives.
Maybe that’s too much to ask for.
At least we can stop throwing away food.
Until he volunteered to go to Niger to try and help few of the millions that are on the brink of starvation in the severely drought-hit desert country in western Africa.
“It shook me up,” said Dr Huaidi, a volunteer with Qatar Red Crescent (QRC), a charitable organization which has set up two therapeutic feeding centers in the cities of Zinder and Tanout.
“There were children dying. Mothers begging for help, helplessly watching us help a few, as many as we could, while their own kids were dying on their shoulders,” Dr Huaidi, who joined QRC in 2003, said on his return to Qatar after his two-month long stay in the landlocked African country situated south east of Algeria. “It’s frustrating,” he said.
While here in Qatar, on an average we waste some 800,000 kg of food every single day, about 3.6mn people, out of the total population of 12mn, in around 3000 villages of Niger are facing acute food shortage.
2.5mn of them, including about 150,000 children, suffer from severe malnutrition and are considered “extremely vulnerable.”
“A 14-month-old kid,” Dr Huaidi said, holding out his palm to show the size, “weighed just two kilos.”
“The kid had not eaten for God alone knows how many days.”
The cause of the nutrition crisis in the country, ranked the second poorest in the world, has been a prolonged drought and locust infestation that has destroyed crops and livestock across Niger, 85% of the population of which survives on agriculture.
Children are dying daily in the few feeding centers there are, where their place in the queue could make the difference between life and death.
It is estimated that one out of four children in Niger dies before its fifth birthday.
The two QRC feeding centers, which have treated 336 cases of acute malnutrition ever since they set up end of June, can accommodate only about 200 children each at a time.
“Children are admitted depending upon their mean weight. We admit the most serious ones first. Once they are discharged we provide the entire family with 100 kgs of food, which would last them for a while, and then we give them another 100 kgs,” Dr Huaidi said.
This QRC relief operation, which will continue till the year end, is likely to cost QR3.65mn.
“It’s disheartening,” Dr Huaidi said, “to send back hungry people from the feeding centers without treatment. But we can’t help it. We can only help a few.”
He said once hundreds of starving people broke through the feeding center’s gates screaming for help. “What do you do when you see that? You feel so helpless,” he said.
Dr Huaidi said those that could not be admitted into the two QRC feeding centers, which have just two doctors each, were advised “some medicines and some other feeding centers” where they could go and try their luck.
Inside the center, seeing children screaming and yelling, the feeling is harrowing, he added. They’re screaming because they’re hungry and ridden with diseases – everything from cholera to malaria to pneumonia.
The QRC is aware what its doing for the people of Niger is just a drop in the ocean. “We are trying to play our part, doing as much as we can. Hopefully, looking at us, several other people will try and play their part as well,” said QRC assistant secretary general Saleh Ali al-Muhanadi, at a press conference recently.
The UN World Food Program said it needed about $30mn to feed the hungry in Niger. So far it has a commitment from donor nations of just $9mn.
Aid workers in the country, situated on the Sahara’s southern fringe, say donors see no interest in investing or putting in more donations due to the “lack of incentive”.
“The donors, the international community, they don’t even know where Niger is,” Johanne Sekkenes of Medical Sans Frontiers (MSF), one of the active medical charities in Niger, was quoted as saying in an agency report.
“Children are dying of hunger today,” she said from Niamey, the capital. “The problem is that nobody cares. The big donors accept this unacceptable situation in Niger.”
Niger, which apart from uranium has precious few resources, had simply failed to attract the kind of sustained food and agricultural aid necessary over the years to drag itself out of a permanent hand-to-mouth existence, Sekkenes said.
It is worth noting that Niger is the third largest uranium producer, yet most of the revenues of this lucrative trade accrue to the Western military industrial complex involved in the production of nuclear weapons.
International charity World Vision’s Emmanuel Isch said it had been difficult to get the world’s attention. “Even six months ago as we were doing assessments, we saw the situation,” he said.
“A food crisis is a slow onset situation, it’s not like a natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane that hits really suddenly and the media attention is focused on it. So it’s difficult to get support,” said Suzanne Charest of the Canadian Red Cross.
The UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egelad, talking to BBC accused the international community of reacting slowly to the crisis, which was widely predicted after last year’s poor harvests.
But initial food appeals went largely unheeded.
Needy families, scattered across the semi-arid south of the country, are roaming the parched desert looking for help.
One family, a set of journalists came across, did not even know where they were going.
“I’m wandering like a madman,” the father told them. “I’m afraid we’ll all starve.”
They were “hundreds of miles from the nearest food distribution point.”
Oxfam, another charity, said families were feeding their children “grass and leaves” to keep them alive.
According to a UNIRIN report, the problem was not a lack of food nationally. Total grain production last year – though dipping below a five-year average – was 22% more than the 2000/2001 season, a year in which “there was no major food security crisis,” the report said.
“What has changed this year is that in some parts of a southern belt sweeping from the border with Burkina to Chad, food prices are critically high, while the value of livestock has crashed.”
A 100kg bag of millet, the staple grain, sold for around $16 to $24 last year but now costs $44.
The famine in Niger is attributable to high retail prices and a lack of purchasing power. It is also accompanied by a crisis of the livestock economy, which has received virtually “no support from the government,” the report said.
After the news cameras are switched off and the world’s journalists and charities leave Niger, what is almost certain is that next season the poor will again suffer the pain of hunger and the weakest children will die.
“In any given year, in any given village, you will find malnourished children in Niger,” said a US-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) report.
A US-based CNN journalist based in Niger said: “For a journalist who has covered refugee camps across Africa – from Darfur, Sudan, to Eastern Congo to Liberia – each time there is the haunting feeling of a desperate child staring up at you with big, brown eyes.”
“The feeling is one of helplessness, but there is nothing one can do. We’re just here to tell the story. But at the end of the day, the experience is heart-wrenching and very draining.”
Even QRC has its limitations. Most likely the charity will close down relief operations in December this year. At least that’s the plan.
“We need money to go on,” Dr Huaidi said. “We need more doctors. Two doctors are not enough for 200 people.”
“But who would want to leave this cushy life in Qatar and go and serve people in Africa?”
Really, who? Except a few like Dr Huaidi or Dr Salam Anwar Hussein, still in Niger, who don’t expect a monthly salary for everything they do in their lives.
Maybe that’s too much to ask for.
At least we can stop throwing away food.
posted by Once the Conman at 12:11 PM
3 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Who are you gadarene???? come out of ytour shell man. really.
That is sad.
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