The fear of famine in West Africa is being compounded by another threat — the cross-border fallout from ethnic violence in Mali and Sudan’s Darfur region.
Canadian development experts say there’s increased potential for further unrest amid the misery of spiralling hunger across several countries in the increasingly dry and afflicted Sahel belt.
The semi-arid belt spans
Africa along the southern Sahara Desert and some greener lands to the south, but its western span has been ravaged by a severe drought that threatens to dwarf last year’s famine in East Africa.
The United Nations and other major international bodies are warning of a famine that could affect 23 million people across Niger, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania unless a major global rescue effort is mounted.
The world’s aid agencies are still reeling from last year’s full-blown famine further east in the Horn of Africa that killed tens of thousands and affected almost 10 billion in four countries, including Ethiopia and Somalia.
"We absolutely need to have an intervention at this point to help us avoid an emergency. We’ve got to sound the alarm bells globally," Evelyne Guindon, CARE Canada’s head of international programs told The Canadian Press Tuesday from Chad.
Guindon visited the Chadian region that borders the Sudanese region of Darfur, which has seen tens of thousands of refugees fleeing nine years of civil war.
She said impoverished Chadians have welcomed fleeing refugees, but they are suffering from a lack of rain, poor harvests and no access to water.
"These people have been taken in by critically poor people, people who have opened their arms, helped them out. Many of them are from the same tribe. But it’s the host community we’re most concerned about. They don’t have access to food because they’re not refugees," Guindon explained.
Oxfam’s Louis Belanger tells a similar story from Mali, which has been plagued by a month of attacks by a rebel group in its north that has displaced tens of thousands. The violence has sent at least 15,000 fleeing to impoverished Niger.
"Imagine host communities already going through a food crisis hosting refuges from Mali," Belanger said from his base in neighbouring Senegal. "This is a pretty extraordinary circumstance."
Dave Toycen, president of World Vision Canada, said the fear was palpable in Mali among parents of hungry children, who face empty fields and waits of several months before the next planting season.
"I was talking to one father who said, I try to not to panic because I don’t want to scare my children," Toycen said in an interview from Mali this week.
"It feels like they are sliding into this crisis. We are not seeing large numbers of starving, skeletal children. But the malnutrition rate is creeping upward."
