One Million Children in the Sahel at Risk of Malnutrition by Spring

30 January 2012 - As the food crisis looms in the Sahel region of West Africa, Action Against Hunger has launched a response plan to mitigate the impact of food security on the nutrition of young children in the weeks ahead to avoid a deterioration of the crisis.

More than 10 million people across the region are at risk of food shortages* and Early Warning Systems are on high alert: poor harvests and food shortages threaten to push even more families into hunger; cereal prices are 60 to 85 per cent higher than average prices over the last five years; and thousands of families are expected to exhaust their food reserves before March.

This year the hunger gap in the Sahel (the period between harvests) is predicted to begin in March instead of July. Ten million families will have exhausted their food reserves and methods of coping before the next harvest begins in October. Families are still struggling to recover from previous crises, and the primary concern is how already-vulnerable communities will cope with further rises in food prices, one of the determining factors of how the emergency in the Sahel will unfold.

"Although the 2011 harvest has not been catastrophic, after the drought of 2005 there have not been two consecutive years of good harvests. Many of the most vulnerable households are still extremely weak from the situation six years ago, and unable to cope with the slightest shock," explains the regional representative of Action Against Hunger in West Africa, Patricia Hoorelbeke.

Children under five and pregnant women will be the most vulnerable

This crisis will particularly affect children under five, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers if efforts to prevent the crisis are not scaled up. Acute malnutrition levels have already exceeded emergency thresholds in many areas of Chad and Mauritania. Many people have already adopted coping mechanisms such as reducing the number of meals they eat daily.

The hunger season

Why will this year’s hunger season - when household food stocks from the last harvest begin to run out - begin early? According to Vincent Taillandier from Action Against Hunger, “this is not only due to lack of rain, pasture and crops. In the absence of storage facilities and loans, many farmers have no choice but to sell their crops the moment they are ready, only to buy food on local markets months later, at prices four times as high. In addition, thousands of impoverished households in the Sahel were previously dependent on family members working in Libya and Ivory Coast sending money home. Political instability has forced 200,000 workers to return to their home countries, resulting in lower remittances.”

Acting now will save lives and money...

The crisis in the Sahel region is still very different from the devastating food crisis in East Africa last year, but there is no time to lose. Programmes aimed at supporting families in accessing foods in local markets such as cash-based interventions and cash-for-work schemes, or food distributions for families with acutely malnourished children, can help mitigate the crisis.

“We cannot afford a repeat of East Africa,” said Jean Michel Grand, Action Against Hunger-UK’s Executive Director. “We need to act now so we don’t see the same images of starving children as we did in 2010. How many more lessons do we need to learn?”

Action Against Hunger is strengthening its teams and resources in the Sahel and has articulated an intervention plan divided into three phases – Mitigation, Response and Rehabilitation. Programmes are already operational across the five most affected countries, including cash initiatives, programmes to build resilience, such as the rehabilitation of water points and agriculture and nutrition and food security programmes.

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*OCHA January 2012