Why has the humanitarian response to the Niger crisis been so slow? The answer, like the problem, is complex, writes Paul Cullen.
Whenever something major goes wrong in the world, and particularly when another sub-Saharan African country slips into a food crisis, the fingers of blame start pointing in a familiar circle.
The aid agencies blame the United Nations, the UN blames its donors, the donors blame the government of the country - and everyone blames the international community.
It's the same old story this month with the situation in Niger.
"All the signs were blinking red," says aid agency Médecins sans Frontières of the food crisis in the world's second-poorest country. "It's the international community that failed to set up an emergency response to this crisis.
"The Irish Government should exert maximum pressure on the international community to ensure that massive quantities of food are rushed to Niger," says another agency, Goal.
It's a handy trope, blaming things on "the international community"; indeed, I confess to having done it myself. For a start, the - let's call it the IC - is a difficult entity to pin down; it doesn't have offices you could picket outside, or even a postal address to which you could send a politely-written complaint.
It isn't clear, either, whether the IC belongs to "them", or "us".
When Irish people complain about the IC, you get the impression they are referring to some external entity or, at most, some grouping in which we play only a small role and have next to no influence.
The catastrophe in Niger has been presented as a case of action being taken "too little, too late" by the IC. Indifferent or at best distracted donors failed to respond to various appeals by the UN for money until intrepid television reporters uncovered appalling scenes of starvation in the worst-hit provinces.
Unfortunately, just as in war, truth is an early casualty when vested interests crank up their efforts during a humanitarian disaster. In many respects, the situation in Niger is not as it has been presented and in all respects, it is more complex than portrayed.
I am not arguing that there isn't a crisis in Niger, where the UN estimates 3.6 million people are short of food after failures in last year's harvest and problems caused by locust infestation. It is clear, too, that the humanitarian response has been slow; as a result, we will spend $80 now to save a child's life when feeding the child last year would have cost just $1.
Yet as reporters in Niger have found this week, plenty of food is available in the markets, albeit at prices that local people cannot afford.
Last year's harvest was not destroyed, as has been reported; total grain production was down about 11 per cent because of the drought and the locust infestation.
The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) has complained repeatedly about the failure of donors to respond to the various appeals it launched since last year. Yet a review of WFP's press material from last year shows that while the organisation flagged problems in Niger, it did not attach to them any exceptional urgency.
Last December, for example, in a report on the situation in four west African countries, it noted that "good harvests" were recorded in some areas of Niger not affected by drought or locusts. A month earlier, it said locusts had caused severe damage to crops "but the impact is localised". This is hardly the language of the red alert. Donor countries could be excused for not realising that Niger was a cut above the many other appeals in terms of seriousness.
The fact is that it is very difficult to define famine, even after the fact. Organisations sometimes downplay the risk of famine, either out of embarrassment at their lack of action, or because they know that to do so will drive up food prices further. In addition, no one who wants to fundraise in the future wishes to be caught "crying wolf" this time.
In contrast, smaller agencies which rely heavily on donations from the public tend to have little patience for such quibbles. In a sense, they are right - if people are dying, we have a moral duty to intervene - although their judgments are often based on hunches rather than hard data.
In the case of Niger, there were few NGOs operating in the country who could relay the necessary warning signs. Worldwide attention in the early part of this year was firmly fixed on the tsunami-affected countries in Asia and, to a lesser extent, the Darfur region of Sudan. It was only in April and May that MSF carried out surveys in which signs of widespread malnutrition showed up in Niger.
One theory has it that the government in Niger erred earlier in the year by favouring food subsidies over free food distributions as a way of dealing with the problem. It seems the reason for not giving food away was to avoid the promotion of a dependency culture.
However, with the price of staple foods already having doubled and with the collapse in cattle prices severely affecting family incomes, even subsidised prices were too expensive for most people.
This week, the aid started arriving. It may end up costing a lot more than originally planned, but widespread famine will surely be averted. A few lessons will have been learned, but the long-term problems faced by Niger and other countries in the region will not have gone away.
The creation of an international fund to deal with such humanitarian crises might seem to offer a solution to a recurrent problem. However, it would have made little difference in the present case. All governments, Ireland's included, and many aid agencies set aside money to provide emergency relief; moving this to the control of some UN body will change little, apart from handing responsibility from a locally-elected politician to an unaccountable bureaucrat in New York or Geneva.