Niger Food Crisis

The severest food crises in Africa in the last 30 years were:

The 1983-1985 Famine in Ethiopia has primarily been blamed on drought which was caused by climate change. At the time officials from the United Nations reported that “50 to 100 children were dying daily”. Furthermore, the famine was further worsened by the civil war which hampered access to the affected regions for both the national and the international aid workers (Poster, 2012).

In 2002, Malawi faced a devastating food crisis, during which hundreds of people died of hunger, and thousands suffered due to a country-wide cholera epidemic. By middle of 2002, over 3.2 million people needed emergency food aid, one-third of Malawi’s population. Having sold its strategic grain reserve

In 2004, harvests were below expectation due to poor rains and a locust invasion causing widespread food shortages in Niger. The crisis affected about 3.5 million people with more than 800,000 thousand suffering from severe food shortage. In 2004–05, Niger received global attention because of high numbers of acute malnutrition among children and high rates of infant and child mortality as a result of the food crisis. The situation in 2004–05 was ‘not a transitory emergency but a permanent feature of mounting vulnerability’ (Hempshire, et al., 2009). The agricultural sector is crippled by perpetual drought cycle, desertification, high population growth rate and lack of infrastructure thus the agricultural sector is kept only at subsistence level (Rajak, 2011).

The Horn of Africa suffered a food crisis in 2006, and the effected countries include Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti, and the main cause was a severe drought. The crisis was further worsened by military conflicts in the area which prevented the humanitarian aid from reaching the most affected regions. The crisis lead to a lack of access to clean water and sanitation for over 12 million people. The droughts have also weakened resilience of the land and people diminishing the prospects of ever achieving future water and food security (Munang & Nkem,

The populations in were again affected by shortage of food and the World Food Program estimated that 10 million people faced severe food shortages. In Somalia tens of thousands of people died of malnutrition, a situation brought about both by drought and perpetuated by warfare (Tran, 2011).

Global Food crisis status

The number of people, world-wide, at risk of hunger is expected to increase with 10–20 per cent by 2050 as a result of climate change (IFPRI, 2009a). Despite the increase in food production, more than one in seven people still do not have access to adequate nutrition leading to malnourishment. The threefold challenge that the world now face is to match the changing demand for food from a larger and more prosperous population to its supply and to do this in an environmentally and socially sustainable way that also warrants the world’s poorest people food security. An estimate of thirty to forty percent of food in the world is lost to waste, mainly due to the absence of food-chain infrastructure and the lack of knowledge in the developing