At least 2.5m people in the three countries need food aid and like Niger they were hit by drought and a plague of locusts last year.

Niger's president is due to visit the worst hit south of his country, where aid is now beginning to arrive.
The UN's food agency says it expects to feed 250,000 people within a few days.
Region
The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned that other countries in the Sahara region were also badly hit.


In neighbouring Mali, some 1.1 million people will need food aid this year.
About 5,000 children in the north are suffering from acute malnutrition, and infant mortality in some areas has reached record levels, the UN says.
In northern Burkina Faso, some 500,000 people are in need of food aid and people are leaving their homes in search of food.
Niger
In southern Niger, the UN estimates it will be able to feed 1.2m people by September, but that only represents a third of those in need of food.








NIGER IN FACTS AND FIGURES
Landlocked country in West Africa
One of poorest nations in world
Population of 11.5m
60% of population live on $1 a day
50% of population under 15
82% of population depend on subsistence farming Source: UNDP

The BBC's Hilary Andersson in Niger says that with rains now in full flow in the south of the country, disease is spreading and aid workers predict the crisis will escalate over the next few weeks.
Landlocked Niger is one of the world's two poorest countries and it rarely grows enough food to feed its population.
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said that the international community has put more money into the Niger relief effort over the past 10 days than it had during the previous 10 months.

No amount of aid or reduction in corruption will change the fact that Africa is, for the most part, a desert. Africa needs education on population control, help from developed nations to create hardy crops and better technologies for extracting water.

Burning Spear wrote:

See now these critics are informed by peculiar American obsession with Africa...


Firstly, the popular belief that African countries are more corrupt than European, Asian or American ones is racist. Moreover, the belief derived from this assertion, that corruption causes underdevelopment is unproven. Actually, I would argue the reverse is the case history has proven that the most developed nation attained this level of development precisely because they were and remain corrupt. Just because Africa has lost the argument- unfortunately, it does not have the power to rewrite history or the means to dictate the terms of engagement with the rest of the world-does not make that scurrilous argument anymore salient.

Secondly, Africa is under populated relative to other parts of the world; this too has its negative economic repercussion. India, which is one country, probably not as big as Sudan, has more population than the entire continent of Africa. Even tiny Bangladesh has as much if not more people than Nigeria the most populous country in Africa. Sure when economists talk of population, they mean it in terms/context of a countries ability to feed itself, therefore even a country with 10 people could be construed as over populated if it has only the means to feed 5 people. However, the example just given, its ridiculous assumptions, highlights why many people think that this way of viewing population is a cynical exercise intended to disguise and justify America’s unnatural interest in the population of Africa.

Those with long memory might recall how in the early nineties after Ethiopian famine we were inundated with American economist and analysts quoting Malthus and forecasting and making dire warning that the greatest danger that faced the world is over population repeatedly they kept warning of African countries expected population in the next decade--that makes the prognosis round about now.

If memory serves me right, they predicted that Nigeria population would reach 1 billion by now thus overtaking India (they predicted India’s population then billow 1 billion would remain stable because of her progress) and they made similar prediction for Kenya stating that Kenya had the fastest growing population. They completely omitted refrence to Asia, which is so overpopulated in actual terms even then that the continent is in danger of sinking into the earth from all that weight.


So, no thanks, Africa doesn’t need education on population control at list not from Americathe last time it educated anyone about population control was when it decided to target black American single mothers pregnancies and it sure worked out fine because now Hispanics are gaining more power by out breeding black Americans. Moreover their dire predictions for African population growth did not materialise -who know maybe they did something- like HIV maybe….


Finally, on the viability of certain African countries due to the effects of desertification clearly something will have to be done in the long term. Both external agencies and local African experts have several solutions ranging from the strategic redeployment of trees, irrigation techniques such as those employed in Ethiopia, etc I do not think culling the population of African countries most of which are scarcely populated is a solution. What is the point if that is what is already happening anyway? For me personally I think that certain Africa countries should merge, as some are not viable. Some are too small, others landlocked and others too arid. These difficulties can be overcome with industrialising however since this is not likely to happen and because most African countries are agricultural and will remain so for the near future, something most be done. Merging of countries make sense, especially in cases were a neighbour is too small and contrived, for instance Togo. Therefore, Ghana should absorb Togo or where countries share similar ethnic groups, for example Niger, Nigeria and Benin should really be one country.