Nicholas Kristof: Year After Year, Grave After Grave.

Nick Kristoff picks up on something that regular readers here will know about, the inadequacy of the methods of food aid delivery.

Goure, Niger -- Welcome to the most wretched country
in the world.

Niger is dead last of the 177 nations ranked in the
latest U.N. Human Development Report, based on its
heartbreaking rates of poverty, illiteracy and
mortality. On a 650-mile drive across the country from
the Niger capital, Niamey, to this eastern city of
Goure, I stopped in village after village where
peasants told of young children dying of starvation in
the last few months. One man named Haroun Mani had
just buried three of his eight children.

''They didn't have enough to eat, and then they got
diarrhea and weakened and died,'' he explained. None
had seen a doctor; in Niger, there is one doctor for
every 33,000 people.

Granted, it's difficult for Western readers who are
dieting to comprehend people who are starving. But
Niger seems a good place to ponder the failings of a
system of international aid that is often irrational
and catastrophically inept, leading to the deaths of
those children, Suraj, 5, Barida, 3, and Hawau, 2 --
along with millions more across the continent.

A crucial mistake is our refusal to provide
substantial agricultural assistance to increase
African food production. Instead, we ship tons of food
in emergency aid after people have already started
dying. It's like a policy of scrimping on manhole
covers because we're too busy rescuing people who fall
into manholes.

In Niger, it has been apparent since the beginning of
this year that a food crisis was coming, but the world
ignored a U.N. emergency appeal for $3 million in aid
in February. Then in July, BBC television showed
wrenching images of children dying. Niger promptly
received more aid in the last 10 days of July than it
had received in the previous eight months.

In fact, the situation is more complex than the
television images suggest. The reality is that people
in Niger are always starving.

''There was a crisis last year, and there'll be a
crisis next year,'' said Claude Dunn, who runs the
World Food Program office in Maradi. This year's
crisis was especially bad, but year in, year out,
160,000 children under the age of 5 die in Niger --
one child in four never reaches 5. In other words,
every single week this small country faces a
9/11-sized toll, composed entirely of dead children.
And yet no one is declaring: We are all Nigeriens.

One problem is that U.S. law generally requires our
food aid to be purchased in American markets and
transported on American ships. The upshot is that much
of the donation is wasted on shipping costs, the aid
is delayed, and when it arrives our grain risks
depressing local prices and long-term production
incentives. To his credit, President Bush has pushed
to ease this requirement, but members of Congress are
blocking him, because they value farmers' votes more
than African lives.

Above all, we need a major new international
initiative to extend the green revolution to Africa.
Farmers in tropical Africa get only 1,500 pounds of
cereal grain per acre, compared with 4,900 pounds in
China. Pedro Sanchez, an agricultural expert at
Columbia University, has estimated that Africans could
triple food production if they used modern seeds and
methods.

In the village of Angaual Goge Haouna, where seven
children died in the last few months of starvation,
villagers said they wanted more fertilizer above all,
as well as better seeds and help exploiting a nearby
lake for irrigation.

''I'm not only using the same techniques as my
grandfather, I'm actually using the same implements,''
said Momom Bukhary, a 63-year-old man. ''And this land
used to be far more productive than it is now. When I
was young, the annual harvest would last a full year,
longer in good times. Now it only lasts three months,
and then we run out of food.''

A major reason is that the soil has been depleted of
nutrients. But in sub-Saharan Africa, farmers apply an
average of 9 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare,
compared with 206 kilos in industrialized countries.

In the news business, we don't lead with headlines
like ''Millions of Children Dying in Africa,'' because
that's not actually news. It's the wallpaper.

Yet realities like that should inspire our priorities.
And we're not even using our aid money wisely. Unless
we help start a green revolution in Africa, we'll be
back in Niger year after year -- and every village
will be surrounded by more tiny graves.

Some further reading on the subject perhaps? Me, blogging? Here, here and here is Owen Barder, here’s Aunty Marianne, me again at Techcentralstation, well, do you need any more? Nice to see that it makes the mainstream at least.

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