Is God angry at me? asks mother

THE frail baby boy she cradles has arms no thicker than her finger. His belly has hollowed and his skin has sagged as his weight has dropped.

Rakiya Nassirou weeps constantly over her son, wondering what is happening to him and whether God is angry with her.

But six-month-old Rabiou is not her only worry. Another boy, three-year-old Moussa, is with her at this feeding station run by Doctors Without Borders. Ms Nassirou left four more children and her sick husband in their village two weeks ago with no food.

Women often bear the brunt of Niger’s crises, since many men travel to neighbouring countries for work, often for years at a time.

“I hope God will give us life and health and take us out of this poverty,” she said.

Lying on a blanket at the feeding centre, she said: “I cry because I cannot understand what is happening to my son.

“I cry because I don’t know what to do. I have been crying ever since I got here.

“I’ll do anything for him to get better,” she said.

The aid agencies now scrambling to save these children say it didn’t have to be this way.

Even in the best of circumstances, they acknowledge, hunger shadows Niger and its neighbours along the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and other ills kill one in four children before the age of five.

But last Autumn, things got much worse. The rains didn’t come. Then the locusts, the worst infestation in 15 years, arrived.

A United Nations appeal in November for help for Niger was all but ignored. Another appeal in March for $16 million resulted in about $1m (e13m) in contributions.

Even as world attention was focused on Africa last month at a Group of 8 summit of the world’s richest nations, little happened.

Niger was offered debt forgiveness, but nothing was done about the hunger issue.

The crisis underscores one of the long-standing problems faced by international relief agencies. It is much easier to raise money once starvation has set in and children are dying than to prod donors to head off a looming crisis.

Now, the World Food Programme estimates 2.5 million of Niger’s nearly 12 million people are at risk of hunger; 1.6 million of them need immediate help.

And the crisis is spreading. An additional 1.5 million people in neighboring Mali, Mauritania and Burkino Faso need food aid.

Only recent television footage of starving children has started making a difference.

Johanne Sekkenes, head of Doctors Without Border’s mission to Niger, said: “We are going into the worst period of the year, in the coming four to five weeks, with the rainy period and diarrhoea.

“And this is the last month before the harvest, meaning there are few food stocks and they are running very low.”

Doctors Without Borders admits nearly 1,300 children a week to its emergency feeding programme in the Maradi region, 340 miles east of Niamey. The numbers are still rising.

The group has treated almost 15,000 severely malnourished children since January, 5% of whom died.

According to UNICEF, 192,000 malnourished children in Niger need help, 32,000 of whom are severely malnourished and facing death.

Two-thirds of Niger is desert and only 15% of the land is suitable for farming. It is regarded as the second-poorest country on Earth, ahead only of Sierra Leone, another western African country.

Most of the population depends on herding and subsistence agriculture. It rarely raises a blip on the international radar.

The last time it made headlines was before the Iraq war, when reports surfaced that uranium yellow cake from Niger had found its way to Saddam Hussein.

The report turned out to be false.