Sahel Food Crisis Looms

After a severe drought, the Sahel region in Africa – a stretch of arid land from coast to coast that includes sections of Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan – faces a food and nutrition crisis in the coming months.

According to UN estimates, 10 million people are already at risk. Without intervention, that number will grow, and the Sahel will face a situation as dire as that in the Horn of Africa last summer and fall. A coalition of Canadian NGOs wrote in an op-ed in The Star, "Across the region, erratic rainfall, endemic poverty, dangerously low food reserves and rising prices for staples are combining to create an escalating crisis. The warning signs are both clear and growing. The longer we wait for additional evidence, the larger the scale of the suffering. ... While a full-blown crisis attracts more attention with vivid images and stories of severely malnourished children, it is by acting before the situation reaches that point that more lives can be saved."

Food unavailability is exacerbated by the political situation in several of the countries in the region, most recently the current upheaval in Mali. Action Against Hunger told Dawn.com that in 20 percent of refugee and IDP families in the region, at least one child has severe acute malnutrition. 

For more information, read the full pieces in The Star and Dawn.com, or follow the Twitter hashtag #SahelNOW.