The crisis currently unfolding in Niger possesses many elements familiar from previous dramas in sub-Saharan African countries. Millions of people face starvation as drought and locusts destroy their harvest. The inter-national community fails to heed warnings from UN agencies. The government in the world's second-poorest country is slow to react. The public in the West responds only when it learns of the impending catastrophe from television news programmes.
Such disasters, involving widespread threatened famine, were supposed to be a thing of the past. Since the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, complex early warning systems have been put in place to avert similar catastrophes. By and large, they have worked; although large swathes of southern and eastern Africa have suffered severe food shortages at various times over the past decade, with appalling consequences for the regions' inhabitants, outright famine has been averted.
The world has enough food to feed all its inhabitants, and even Africa has adequate supplies for its population. The challenge is to move these supplies to the areas where they are needed as quickly as possible.
So what has gone wrong this time? Currently, over one-quarter of Niger's 12 million inhabitants are in urgent need of food aid and, relief workers say, 150,000 children could die unless they get help soon. When the UN first appealed for aid last November it received hardly any pledges. A second appeal for $16 million in May was also ignored. It is hard to disagree with the conclusion reached by Jan Egeland, the UN's humanitarian relief co-ordinator, who said: "The world wakes up when we see images on the TV and when we see children dying". This month, after the television pictures were aired, it asked again, this time for $30 million, and $10 million was pledged. However, as Egeland pointed out, these funds may arrive too late to help some of the affected children.
The missing ingredient in the response from the international community has been a sense of urgency. Until this month, most people in the Anglophone world would have been hard pressed to find Niger on a map, partly because it has traditionally belonged to the French sphere of influence. While the UN was aware of the growing food crisis, it failed to convey the gravity of the situation to potential donors. Aid agencies have been critical of the inter-national response, but the UK's Disasters Emergency Committee (of which Irish agency Concern is a member) has yet to launch a formal appeal.
Now that aid is belatedly on the way, the worst effects of the threatened famine should be averted. However, the underlying causes remain - chronic poverty and malnutrition exacerbated by environmental degradation and poor government. Such long-term problems require long-term solutions, along the lines of the permanent UN fund for humanitarian emergencies proposed by its secretary general, Kofi Annan. The recent debt relief for Niger from the wealthy nations is only a start.