Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Niger. Fame & libero mercato

http://www.guardian.co.uk/famine/story/0,12128,1540214,00.html
The two faces of Niger
Plenty of food - yet the poor are starving
by Jeevan Vasagar in Tahoua, Niger
In Tahoua market, there is no sign that times are hard. Instead, there are
piles of red onions, bundles of glistening spinach, and pumpkins sliced into
orange shards. There are plastic bags of rice, pasta and manioc flour, and
the sound of butchers' knives whistling as they are sharpened before hacking
apart joints of goat and beef.
A few minutes' drive from the market, along muddy streets filled with
puddles of rainwater, there is the more familiar face of Niger. Under canvas
tents, aid workers coax babies with spidery limbs to take sips of milk, or
the smallest dabs of high-protein paste.
Wasted infants are wrapped in gold foil to keep them warm. There is the
sound of children wailing, or coughing in machine-gun bursts.
"I cannot afford to buy millet in the market, so I have no food, and there
is no milk to give my baby," says Fatou, a mother cradling her son Alhassan.
Though he is 12 months old he weighs just 3.3kg (around 7lbs).
Fatou, a slender, childlike young woman in a blue shawl, ate weeds to
survive before her baby was admitted to a treatment centre run by the
medical charity MSF.
This is the strange reality of Niger's hunger crisis. There is plenty of
food, but children are dying because their parents cannot afford to buy it.
The starvation in Niger is not the inevitable consequence of poverty, or
simply the fault of locusts or drought. It is also the result of a belief
that the free market can solve the problems of one of the world's poorest
countries.
The price of grain has skyrocketed; a 100kg bag of millet, the staple grain,
costs around 8,000 to 12,000 West African francs (around £13) last year but
now costs more than 22,000 francs (£25). According to Washington-based
analysts the Famine Early Warning System Network (Fewsnet), drought and
pests have only had a "modest impact" on grain production in Niger.
The last harvest was only 11% below the five-yearly average. Prices have
been rising also because traders in Niger have been exporting grain to
wealthier neighbouring countries, including Nigeria and Ghana.
Niger, the second-poorest country in the world, relies heavily on donors
such as the EU and France, which favour free-market solutions to African
poverty. So the Niger government declined to hand out free food to the
starving. Instead, it offered millet at subsidised prices. But the poorest
could still not afford to buy.
At Tahoua market the traders are reluctant to talk about the hunger crisis
affecting their countrymen as they spread their wares under thatched
verandas jutting out from mud buildings. Snatches of the Qur'an from tinny
tape players compete with Bollywood songs and the growl of lorries bringing
sacks of rice and flour.
One man opens his left palm to display half a dozen tiny scorpions, a living
advert for the herbal scorpion antidote he is selling in his other hand.
Omar Mahmoud, 18, who helps sell rice at his father's shop, blames the
famine on drought: "I know there is hunger. It is because there wasn't
enough rain. The price of millet has gone up because there wasn't enough
rain last year."
Last month around 2,000 protesters marched through the streets of the
capital, Niamey, demanding free food. The government refused. The same
month, G8 finance ministers agreed to write off the country's $2bn (£1.3bn)
debt.
"The appropriate response would have been to do free food distributions in
the worst-affected areas," said Johanne Sekkenes, head of MSF's mission in
Niger.
"We are not speaking about free distribution to everybody, but to the most
affected areas and the most vulnerable people."
The UN, whose World Food Programme distributes emergency supplies in other
hunger-stricken parts of Africa, also declined to distribute free food. The
reason given was that interfering with the free market could disrupt Niger's
development out of poverty.
"I think an emergency response should have started much earlier," says Ms
Sekkenes. "Now we find ourselves in this serious nutritional crisis, with
children under five who are suffering."
Three weeks ago the Niger government, its foreign donor countries and the UN
did a volte-face, jointly agreeing to allow the distribution of free food.
Aid is now being flown in from Europe and trucked from neighbouring
countries.
A total of 3.6 million people live in the regions of Niger affected by the
food crisis. According to the most reliable estimate, some 874,000 people
now need free food to survive.
The food aid will arrive as children weakened by hunger face a new battle
against disease. It is the rainy season in Niger, and the water helps spread
diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea.
In the MSF treatment centre, a three-year-old girl called Aminata is
suffering from a grotesque eye condition. Her eyeball is so swollen with
fluid that it has popped out of her skull and bulges from her face. The
doctors call it a retinal blastoma, the result of an untreated eye
infection.
"The thing in her eye started off very small," said Aminata's mother,
Nisbou. "I did not have money for hospital, so I treated it with herbs,
traditional medicine."
The hunger crisis has struck communities which depend on a mix of
subsistence farming and herding for their livelihoods. The stories told by
the women in the treatment centre show that their plight began when locusts
ate their crop and cattle fodder, but spiralled when the prices of food in
the market shot out of reach.
In desperate times, adults can get by on the poorest of foods, weeds and the
stubble of their crops, but mothers cannot make breastmilk on this diet and
infants cannot eat weeds.
Amid the anxiety, there are unexpected moments of gaiety in the feeding
centre. Asked her age, Nisbou, who is probably about 20, replied: "I am 100
years old." She burst out laughing at her own joke, then looked weary again,
and tucked her baby's deformed face under a lace shawl.

 Plenty of food - yet the poor are starving
Se intervenissero contrastando il mercato, semplicemente metterebbero i 
coltivatori fuori mercato, trasformandoli a loro volta in poveracci che 
devono dipendere dagli aiuti esterni.
Sfortunatamente, le soluzioni a questi problemi non sono semplici.
Se proprio debbono intervenire dall'esterno, che assumano i poveracci 
che non hanno di che mangiare e li facciano lavorare (a costo di pagarli 
solo per scavare e riempire delle buche - tipo lavori socialmente utili).
In questo modo, almeno gli agricoltori beneficeranno del maggiore denaro 
disponibile e potranno spendere di piů, rivitalizzando l'economia.
A sua volta, questo richiede delle riforme sociali e legislative che 
permettano gli investimenti locali e stranieri.
Mirco

 the market shot out of reach.
Il punto mi pare questo: eventi naturali hanno causato la carestia e 
politiche assurde, anzi criminali, del governo l'hanno aggravata.
Se nel secondo paese piu' povero che vive di agricoltura di sussistenza 
    di fronte a un'invasione di locuste il governo non fa un tubo e non 
aiuta nemmeno chi e' rimasto senza cibo be, la questione e' IMHO 
psichiatrica, non economica.
Palmiro Pangloss
-- 
You know, you come from nothing - you're going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!