Children the face of Africa’s unrelenting hunger

TO see Africa’s unrelenting hunger, look at the fevered eyes of 17 malnourished infants languishing in a west African hospital.

Food crises there have focused attention on the politics and geography of hunger on the world’s poorest continent, and how rich nations respond.

The UN says it needs $2 billion to help feed more than 25 million Africans in 2005. Funds raised so far? Less than half.

A spokesman for the UN’s World Food Program, Peter Smerdon, said: “Hot spots come and go due to crisis and drought, but the vast majority of people (Africans) are just too poor to feed themselves when there’s a slight disruption of their environment.”

This year’s hot spots have been where poor rains and a plague of locusts last year wiped out crops and grazing lands. Aid groups warned of looming hunger in Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.

Amid preoccupation with the Asian tsunami disaster, pleas for help were mostly ignored. Only in recent weeks, when media beamed images of starving children in Niger around the globe, did aid start to arrive there.

“As you can see from Niger, you have a long period with nothing, then the camera crews arrive and it becomes a political issue. Then aid arrives,” said Smerdon.

One-in-three of Africa’s 900 million people lack enough food each day, the United Nations says.

Smerton said hunger is “a chronic problem, particularly in chronically impoverished places. It takes only something small to push people into the position where they need food aid. The long-term solution is more development.”

In eastern Africa, five years of lower-than-normal rains have meant a prolonged drought in Eritrea and Ethiopia and upsurge in those needing food aid.

In Ethiopia, five million of the country’s 70 million people are termed by experts as chronically hungry, surviving on emergency food aid and a work-for-food or cash program. Further, some four million other Ethiopians have needed food aid due to the prolonged drought.

In the sand-blown belt stretching from Eritrea in the east to Mauritania in the west, this year’s crisis is largely environmental, save those going hungry in Sudan’s civil-war embroiled Darfur region.

In Zimbabwe, once one of the strongest economies in the region, the blame is placed on mankind.

UN experts say four million people there urgently need relief food to survive until the next harvest.

The governments of Mali and Niger, along with most aid workers, eschew the term “famine,” but this is disputed by Mohammed Ould Mahmoud, and Oxfam program director in Mali.

“The situation is very grave,” he said.