THE leaders of the Group of Eight, pressured by enthusiastic Live8 pop concerts around the world masterminded by Bob Geldof and a Make poverty history march to Gleneagles in Scotland, committed to a comprehensive package of aid to Africa on 8 July. Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, announced the G8 would increase aid to Africa by $25bn, more than double 2004 levels; increase global assistance by around $50bn a year by 2010; provide near-universal access to HIV/Aids treatment drugs; cancel the debt of some of the world’s poorest nations; and address trade reforms soon.

The One campaign to make poverty history applauded this advance, saying it was encouraged by the commitment at the summit ‘to fighting the crisis of extreme poverty and global Aids’. It added that the pledges were a positive step in a comprehensive debt-aid-trade deal to reduce extreme poverty in the poorest countries, and that, based on the outcomes of this summit, the United States had moved a little nearer to the One campaign’s goal of an additional 1% of its budget to reducing extreme poverty.

But the package has been criticised. Crucially important trade reforms have been relegated to a nebulous future date. And financial assistance to Africa’s governments may be of limited use, in the absence of transparency throughout the continent. The G8 commitment will come into effect years too late to help Niger’s silent food crisis, neglected by the media, which has now become a disastrous famine.

Niger’s president, Mamadou Tanja, has defended his government’s handling of the crisis, saying appeals for international assistance last November went unanswered.

A Unicef statement said: ‘Niger is one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries. It holds the second-highest under-five mortality rate in the world with one in five children dying before their fifth birthday. Only 48% of the population has access to primary healthcare. Niger has been a silent emergency in essential areas such as health, nutrition and education for years. Many of its families rely on subsistence farming, growing enough food to feed themselves from harvest to harvest. During 2004 crops were devastated by swarms of locusts – in some areas 100% of crops were affected. As well as this, insufficient rainfall has resulted in poor harvests, affecting both farmers and livestock breeders.

‘According to government figures, 3.3 million people, including 800,000 children under five years of age, are affected by this current crisis. Admissions to the Unicef-¬ supported therapeutic feeding centres are rising rapidly and are at least twice as high as last year. Under the best of circumstances more than 1 million children suffer from some form of malnutrition in Niger. This number has dramatically increased because of the current food shortage.’

Bernoit Leduc of Médecins Sans Frontières said: ‘Between January and June we received 10,000 severely malnourished children. These figures are enormous – they are very high figures for an organisation like MSF.’ Oxfam says that families are feeding their children grass and leaves from trees to keep them alive.

The UN predicts that 150,000 children could die following last year’s disastrous crop. Its top aid official, Jan Egeland, commented: ‘Niger is the example of a neglected emergency, where early warnings went unheeded. The world wakes up when we see images on the television and when we see children dying.’ Sad and familiar.

---