Post by POETICVIBEZ on Aug 3, 2005 2:00:05 GMT -5
The World Responds to Save a Starving Nation
By Ed Wiley III, BET.com Staff Writer
Posted Aug. 2, 2005 – Roughly a thousand starving children a week are pouring into pitals in the desert nation of Niger, as relief workers toil around the clock to pump nourishment into lumps of fragile bones draped in skin.
This latest episode of African distress, with hundreds of thousands of children on the brink of starvation, highlights the world’s obligation to the planet’s second poorest nation, say officials at humanitarian agencies. They say that with debt forgiveness and other forms of global economic assistance, Africa – home to 25 of the world’s poorest nations – would be able to survive such calamities as drought and the invasion of locusts that sparked the current crisis.
“We need to change our thinking. We need to change the way we look at aid from a perspective of charity to one of obligation,” says Bill Fletcher, president of TransAfrica Forum, which advocates for positive change in Africa and the Caribbean.
The good news is that hundreds of tons of food, water and medicine are being airlifted from around the world to Niger. The bad news, however, is that nations have only recently begun to respond, meaning that hundreds of children are already too malnourished to resuscitate. Another macabre irony, say some observers, is that recent rains, which have lured some sprouts from the dry earth, could cease to fall; or, that even if they do continue to fall, they could trigger an epidemic of malaria, dysentery and diarrhea. Not only is there fear that the water will provide breeding grounds for deadly mosquitoes but that they will mix with the dusty, decaying corpses of cattle and other dead things and flow into precious drinking wells.
According to some estimates, about 800,000 of the 3.5 million children are at risk of starvation. Most of the 11 million people who live in this West African country eke out an existence by raising small herds of cattle or by farming just enough millet, maize or other grain to stave off hunger. It’s a delicate existence for a people who earn, on average, less than a dollar a day. So when locusts devour an already meager harvest, as they did this year, the goats, oxen and camels are the first to go – the people are not far behind.
Many people in the United States and other parts of the world never even heard of Niger outside of the context of Iraq and allegations by Great Britain and the United States – later proved false – that Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from there. Discovered in Niger in the 1970s, “yellow cake” uranium, which is used to make nuclear weapons, was one of that country’s most precious resources until export of the mineral began to slump significantly in the 1980s.
People first inhabited Niger about 600,000 years ago, and the region was an important economic crossroads. Slavery also flourished for many years, as people, captured in raids, were sold in open-air markets. Today, Niger, a former French colony from 1922 to 1960, is a dusty, landlocked plot about the size of Texas; it is 80 percent desert.
About two dozen years after the French took over, it bestowed citizenship on the people of Niger. However, that citizenship was negated after Niger gained its independence.
Salih Booker, who heads the Africa advocacy group known as Africa Action, says that Niger’s screams for help more than a year ago could not be heard by a world that cares very little about Black lives.
“Unfortunately, this was not deemed newsworthy until there was a significant body count,” he says. Although the Niger government requested aid as early as November 2004, nothing happened until there were “images of a number of dying Black babies,” he says.
Fletcher agrees. The United States and the world owes Niger compassion, he says.
“We ought to be looking at why we’re spending $400 billion on the Pentagon," he says. "It’s a question of priorities. Why is it that the wealthiest country in contemporary history is spending less than 0.2 percent of its budget on foreign assistance.
“We’re spending $3 billion on aid to Israel, where there are 6.5 million people, and $3 billion on sub-Saharan Africa, where there are 700 million people. Something is definitely wrong with our priorities ”
