The UN's IRIN news has a piece well worth reading in full: "NIGER: Food pressures spread north" along with the a portrait of a southern Niger farmer ("Mariama Adao, 'We help each other… but it is hard'") whose crop failures have driven her to seek work in the equally troubled north. The two paint a more subtle picture of the problems facing a third of Niger's population, all most all of whom depend on small scale farms or pastoralism just to get by. A recent FEWS report from neighboring Mali stresses how the stop and start rains of last June have done in the northern seasonal pastures upon which local pastoralists rely, causing a cascade of pressure as they move south into well producing farms. In pockets of Niger's south we had the same effect: crops withered after spotty rains. Mariama Adao from Matameye migrated early looking for farm work in Agadez to find that floods there had halved the work available. This is how in a poor society any mixed harvest could become a disaster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The UN's IRIN news has a piece well worth reading in full: "NIGER: Food pressures spread north" along with the a portrait of a southern Niger farmer ("Mariama Adao, 'We help each other… but it is hard'") whose crop failures have driven her to seek work in the equally troubled north. The two paint a more subtle picture of the problems facing a third of Niger's population, all most all of whom depend on small scale farms or pastoralism just to get by. A recent FEWS report from neighboring Mali stresses how the stop and start rains of last June have done in the northern seasonal pastures upon which local pastoralists rely, causing a cascade of pressure as they move south into well producing farms. In pockets of Niger's south we had the same effect: crops withered after spotty rains. Mariama Adao from Matameye migrated early looking for farm work in Agadez to find that floods there had halved the work available. This is how in a poor society any mixed harvest could become a disaster.<\/p>\n