Niger is facing another food crisis, CARE International reports, with indications showing that one million people are facing food shortage. The number is likely to double by June.

The situation follows last year’s crisis, where three-fifths of Niger’s population faced critical debt.

CARE, as the largest international non-governmental organisation working in Niger, has been calling for urgent action and investment from the international community six months since the Niger crisis first came to public attention in the UK, both to prevent another emergency and to tackle the current poverty in the world's poorest country.

“The situation for hundreds of thousands of Nigerians is precarious in the extreme,” says Geoffrey Dennis, chief executive of CARE International UK. “Yes, they survived last year’s crisis but as many as three in five households emerged from it heavily in debt and have had to sell much of their harvest to repay loans. Food stocks are now running dangerously low in many parts of the country.”

Dennis adds: “If the international community steps in now, there is a window of opportunity to prevent a recurrence of an emergency on the scale of 2005. If we don’t act, the cost will be felt in both human lives and the financial cost of mounting a full scale relief operation.

|QUOTE|"Last year the British public showed their generosity and raised £26million through the Disasters Emergency Committee for Niger. That money funded life-saving food distributions and helped CARE and other agencies start to help rebuild people’s lives," he said.

CARE reports that international investment must be stepped up urgently in order to increase measures that could prevent another emergency.

“Yet it’s clear Niger’s problems can’t be solved overnight. Let’s not forget that this is the poorest country in the world. And that means it is only by sustained investment in helping people make a living that they will be able to move away from a hand-to-mouth existence.”

Responsible for last year’s distribution of one third of the food distributed throughout the Niger, CARE has operated in Niger for some 30 years and is currently running a variety of programmes to provide long-term solutions to poverty, including women’s savings and loan schemes, agriculture and livestock projects, school feeding, community cereal and seed banks, and encouraging better use of natural resources.

Currently, CARE is running three nutritional recuperation programmes in two regions which have treated over 6,000 malnourished children, training mothers in improved nutrition and health and providing nutrition-rich food ingredients.