Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-08-Speech-4-133"
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"en.20050908.18.4-133"2
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".
Mr President, this motion reflects an anxiety, based on evidence from previous African famines, that dealing with the immediate crisis by flooding the country with foreign food aid might undercut local producers and increase poverty in the longer term. However, there are ways of tackling this crisis which do not risk damaging the local economy.
The NGO Oxfam, for example, is operating income creation schemes so that people can afford to buy food. Oxfam has reduced the number of weak animals by buying them at a fair price and slaughtering them. It is also using voucher-for-work schemes, covering activities such as the removal of animal carcasses, drying of slaughtered meat and reforestation.
The crisis in Niger this year is not exceptional; for many people, the hunger they now face is only a slight worsening of what they see every year. Despite short rains and locust infestation, food production this year was in fact only 11 % below the five-year average. Therefore, the real question is not what caused the crisis this year, but what is causing endemic hunger and poverty. The answer to that is complex; there are reports that, in the villages where women and children are starving, grain is lying in locked household stores, which women are forbidden by custom to enter. We often talk about the importance of the role of women, but there can be no starker an example than this of the damage that occurs when women are powerless. Only one in four girls attend primary school in Niger; if girls start to go to school then women will start to break into their own grain stores.
Finally, we in Europe are making the long-term problem worse because of our failure to take strong enough action on climate change. All the agricultural improvement programmes ever invented will be useless if the desertification of the Sahel continues. Overgrazing and deforestation are factors, but so is the rise in the world's temperature. So let us have some joined-up thinking here in the European Parliament. Next time we are discussing measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, let us remember marginal lands and famine in Africa."@en1
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