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15 percent of Niger's population remains food insecure: UN

Xinhua, April 16, 2015 Adjust font size:

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Wednesday that 2. 5 million people or 15 percent of Niger's population are food insecure as showed in its national survey on food vulnerability in rural areas released earlier in the day.

The Sahel, where Niger is located, continues to face a chronic humanitarian emergency, also worsened by the current violence in Nigeria, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here.

The Sahel spans 5,400 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east, in a belt that varies from several hundred to 1,000 kilometers in width, covering an area of 3,053,200 square kilometers. The region faced several food crisis over the past years.

Niger faces a large cereal deficit and will struggle to feed its people as well as the thousands of Boko Haram refugees that have spilled over its border, reports said in March.

More than 1.5 million people have fled their homes due to the violence, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said. About 1.2 million are displaced internally, while others have crossed into Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Niger's Agriculture Minister Maidagi Alambey said the country faces a cereal deficit of around 230,000 tonnes in 2014/2015 due to uneven and insufficient rainfall.

Earlier this year, OCHA estimated that 3.4 million people in the country faced food insecurity. Endite