Food aid is beginning to arrive in the famine-stricken areas of Niger but in inadequate amounts and not always in the form that starving families need.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and various non-governmental organizations (NGO) said they had started distributing supplies sent by the WFP.

Free food was being distributed in several villages in the Tahoua region, 550 kilometres northeast of the capital Niamey, in one of a number of targeted operations.

But the process is painfully slow: it takes several days to truck the supplies to the NGO's depots and from there out to the villages.

In Barmou, about 30 kilometres north of Tahoua, the British NGO Concern handed out rations of high-energy protein-enriched biscuits and bags of enriched flour to 180 mothers of "moderately" malnourished children.

But many mothers left empty-handed because aid groups have only received food for children judged to be "moderately at risk."

Supplies of food for families that can number eight people have not arrived from the WFP.

The programme was continuing to send out truckloads of emergency food aid flown into Niamey at the end of last week, including 70 tons of protein-fortified biscuits.

Over the next few days it plans to distribute to NGOs working in the vast northwest African country more than 4,000 tons of food destined for the areas hardest hit by the famine, including 2,000 tons of rice and 500 tons of pulses.

By the end of September it plans to have sent 23,000 tons of food aid to the 1.6 million people judged to be especially vulnerable.

Among the NGOs responsible for food distribution are Concern, Islamic Help, Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), Save the Children and the International Federation of Red Cross societies.

Drought, locusts bring hunger

Drought and a plague of locusts which ravaged crops and grazing land in Niger left the country short of 224,000 tons of cereals, or 10 per cent of the total, last year.

But in some villages production fell by half.

The area around Tahoua is one where hunger is particularly acute, together with the region of Tillabery, north of Niamey, and the districts of Maradi and Zinder in the south.

Near Keita, about 50 kilometres east of Tahoua, the Spanish humanitarian organization ACF-Spain was due to distribute rations of enriched flour yesterday to "moderately malnourished" children.

In the coming days it hopes to extend its operations to include whole families in 19 villages in the region.

"This is an emergency," said ACF Director-General Benoit Miribel. "We have to act fast. Once again, it is the poorest and the most dependent who are the most vulnerable, those who have no more money, who are selling their possessions."

There are no official figures for the number of dead. The UN reckons that 3.5 million of Niger's 12 million inhabitants are threatened by famine.

About 800,000 children are concerned, of whom 150,000 are suffering from serious malnutrition.

Experts say that the extent of the famine is hidden because at present it only affects the most vulnerable, above all children under the age of five.

"There are groups of people who are only eating once a day," Miribel said. "Some others, in other regions further north are living off roots. We must not wait for things to get worse."

World reaction too slow

Meanwhile, a top humanitarian activist accused the United Nations of reacting slowly to Niger's hunger crisis, saying rich-world tolerance for African suffering dulled the response.

Bernard Kouchner, who founded medical organization Doctors Without Borders, said the UN agency responsible for food aid, the World Food Programme, should have acted faster.

Speaking in Tahoua, Kouchner said: "I say very clearly: the United Nations system didn't give us sufficient warning. Moreover, they did not react sufficiently," he said in an interview.

"There is a World Food Programme, I would really have liked them to have been more attentive, they were there before the others, but not enough," he said.

Drought and locusts ravaged last October's harvest, leaving an estimated 3.6 million people in the West African country short of food and threatening the lives of tens of thousands of starving children.

The UN agency says it made a plan to tackle the food crisis, but a slow response from international donors to its repeated appeals for cash and problems buying food in the region limited its ability to respond.

(China Daily August 3, 2005)