RAIN News Spring 2010

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RAIN NEWS

Spring 2010

The peoples of the Agadez region, Niger's vast northern desert expanse, are strong and independent. They live a spartan life, well adapted to their severe desert home. Herds of goats, sheep and camels are the nomadic peoples' source of sustenance. These animals provide milk, meat, and income. But drought and lack of pasture lands leave people helpless as they watch their children and treasured herd animals suffer and, all too often, lose their grasp on life.

When people are suffering, they turn to RAIN for help. We are compelled to respond. RAIN recently delivered five tons of food to nomadic schools in the Air Massif. We need to do more. Nomadic children must live at school; food is a necessity.

Parents are mobilized, too. RAIN's women's leather cooperative is giving $3,000 worth of food for children in Gougaram.

RAIN's animal feed centers keep herds alive, in turn ensuring food security for their owners.

RAIN provides help in time of need. And always we are seeking, experimenting - finding paths to long-term sustainable food security. Read on to learn more about our programs.

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www.rain4sahara.org.

On May 4, the New York Times published this article about Niger's current food crisis.
It is compelling in its mixture of tragedy and hope.

NIAMEY, Niger - Outside the state food warehouses here, women sift in the dirt for spilled grains of rice. Seven hundred miles to the east, mothers pluck bitter green berries and boil them for hours in an attempt to feed their children. In urban slums and desert villages, one word is on all lips: famine.

Once again Niger is facing a food crisis, a grimly familiar predicament in a vast desert country with an explosive birthrate and rudimentary agriculture. Rains and crops failed last year - rainfall was about 70 percent below normal in the region - and now half the population of 15 million faces food shortages, officials say. Thus it was in 2005, 1985 and 1974.

But there is a big difference this year: the new military government here is acknowledging serious hunger, trying to do something about it - and asking for help.

Before the country's autocratic president, Mamadou Tandja, was overthrown in February, the state warehouses remained stocked, despite the people's need for help. Now they are largely empty of grain, a sign of how much has been distributed in recent weeks.

The new prime minister travels the suffering countryside, asking about the food shortage. Before, Mr. Tandja would fly into a rage at the very mention of the word famine, according to officials and newspapers here.

And when John Holmes, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator, flew in last week, his extensive caravan received a military and police escort. Though Mr. Holmes was inquiring about what had been one of Niger's most politically delicate topics, chronic hunger, government ministers with retinues of functionaries barreled into the dusty villages with him, and everywhere he went he was treated like a visiting head of state.

In the 2005 famine, by contrast, United Nations agencies were accused by Mr. Tandja of collaborating with the opposition to discredit him.

"Before, we didn't speak about famine; it was forbidden," said Idrissa

Kouboukoye, head of the Niger Foodstuffs Agency office at the edge of town here. He chuckled softly, noting that this year, sacks of grain started to be dispensed from the massive concrete warehouses behind him on March 1, less than two weeks after Mr. Tandja was deposed. "When people who don't have enough to eat have to say that everything is fine, this is a problem," Mr. Kouboukoye said of the previous government.