The Real "Nigergate"

While the predominant mention of Niger in the American press and blogs refers to a U.S. government scandal with international ramifications but nothing really to do with Niger, there is widespread starvation right now in the real Niger, and the West is partly if not mostly responsible for it.

Jeevan Vasagar reports for the Guardian from Niger: This is the strange reality of Niger's hunger crisis. There is plenty of food, but children are dying because their parents cannot afford to buy it.

The starvation in Niger is not the inevitable consequence of poverty, or simply the fault of locusts or drought. It is also the result of a belief that the free market can solve the problems of one of the world's poorest countries.

Niger, the second-poorest country in the world, relies heavily on donors such as the EU and France, which favour free-market solutions to African poverty. So the Niger government declined to hand out free food to the starving. Instead, it offered millet at subsidised prices. But the poorest could still not afford to buy.

The UN, whose World Food Programme distributes emergency supplies in other hunger-stricken parts of Africa, also declined to distribute free food. The reason given was that interfering with the free market could disrupt Niger's development out of poverty.

Three weeks ago, the distribution of free food began for the three quarters of a million to nearly a million people in most need. But much damage has been done.

As was clear from Rwanda, and as is clear from Darfur, the West acts or fails to act in Africa with a variety of motives and problems. There are the old habits of playing power politics with the leaders of corrupt governments, and there are problems of distance and logistics and the absence of economic self-interest, especially when America and the UK are devoting so much blood and treasure to a war in oil-rich Iraq. But in the end it results in de facto racism. The West does not care about Africa, the dark continent, the repository of so much of the darkness in the Western soul.