CRS increases aid to Niger to help stave off famine

[Scott1]

ASHINGTON (CNS) -- Catholic Relief Services is increasing its aid to Niger, the West African nation plagued by drought and locusts.

CRS is increasing its annual $8 million budget for Niger by $3 million and sending additional staff to the country as it tries to stave off famine, said Christopher Daniel, CRS regional representative for West Africa.

"The food security issue is the biggest problem. Faminelike conditions are being reported in pockets of the country, mostly in the areas where CRS is operating," Daniel told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview from the agency's Baltimore headquarters. CRS is the U.S. bishops' international relief and development agency.

Daniel said Niger's population is suffering due to a combination of drought and locust invasion that affected crops during this year's planting season.

The United Nations said July 27 that some 1.2 million people were at risk of starvation and that food stocks in Niger were dwindling.

The combination of attacks by crop-devouring locusts and drought resulted in severe crop damage and the loss of seed that would have been harvested for use in the 2005 planting season. It also has contributed to increases in food prices. Up to 80 percent of crops were lost in the hardest-hit regions, CRS said.

Daniel said CRS is negotiating with its donors to reappropriate money from its various development projects to respond to the current emergency. The agency also is sending additional staff from its Baltimore headquarters to join its 70 mostly national staff members in Niger, he said.

CRS has been sponsoring a seed and voucher program for farmers in Niger to grow or replace crops, but "now they just need food," Daniel said.

The agency is currently feeding about 235,000 people and hopes to expand its emergency food distribution to another 150,000 people, he said.

Some 800,000 of Niger's children under 5 are suffering from hunger; they include 150,000 faced with severe malnutrition, The Associated Press reported July 27.

www.catholic.org

 

[Quiddity]

..that breaks my heart......Holy Father console them.

~Victor

 

[michel]

It breaks mine too; the trouble is this isn't a cure - it just patches them up until they fall again. How can we help Africa, to become self supporting, a proud people ?

 

[Scott1]

It breaks mine too; the trouble is this isn't a cure - it just patches them up until they fall again. How can we help Africa, to become self supporting, a proud people ?

http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=2345

 

[michel]

Thanks for the article Scott; he trouble is that, as the article makes clear, this won't happen in the short term; the Congo has been like it is for forty five years; I remember Dad saying that the ethnic massacres in Rwanda already existed in the mid fifties.

 

[Quiddity]

What really hurts even more is that we truly do have a way to better the situation over there but we need more support. Nothing new.


~Victor

 

[michel]

This sort of article makes me wonder where moralty starts and ends:-



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

Costs

While the Shuttle has been a reasonably successful launch vehicle, it has been unable to meet its goal of radically reducing flight launch costs, as the average launch expenditures during its operations up to 2005 accumulates to $1.3 billion [1], a rather large figure compared to the initial projections of $10 to $20 million. The total cost of the program has been $145 billion as of early 2005 ($112 billion of which was incurred while the program was operational) and is estimated at $174 billion when the Shuttle retires in 2010. NASA's budget for 2005 allocates 30% or $5 billion to Space Shuttle operations. [2]