Nearly half of Niger’s population of 15 million and millions more in Mali and western Chad are struggling to find food, and the situation will worsen unless the international community can urgently mobilize funding say UN aid agencies and NGO’s working in the region.
A revised Emergency Humanitarian Action Plan (EHAP) presented today at the United Nations in New York, requests an additional 180 million dollars to help people in the affected areas survive until the October harvest season. Poor rain falls in 2009 greatly affected agricultural production, and although government officials and international observers have been prepared for food shortages since last fall, the scope of need is greater than expected.
“This is a catastrophic drought” says World Food Programme executive director Josette Sheehan “Donor support is so crucial at this stage.We have now six weeks until it is agreed we will be out of the severe danger zone and the ramp-up has to happen not in a few weeks but now.” Sheehan says pregnant women and children under the age of 5, for whom the affects of severe malnutrition leave permanent and debilitating consequences, are the focus of aid agencies work. Since January, more than 120 000 children have been treated for acute malnutrition but hundreds of thousands more remain at risk.
The crisis has also led to a significant jump in school drop-out rates among children and increased migration from the country-side to larger urban areas, where many are forced to beg or turn to prostitution. Oxfam consultant Eveline Rooijmans says food is available in many parts of Mali and Niger, but as most of the population cannot afford to purchase it, financial support to the population remains the fastest way to prevent the crisis from growing.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 10:12AM
TARP Yields Positive Results, Transparency Issues Linger
By Alexa Gitler - Talk Radio News Service
After the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) issued its seventh quarterly report to Congress Wednesday, Special Inspector General of TARP Neil Barofsky and Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, said that, although the program has yielded some positive results, there are still lingering concerns.
“This quarter has definitively demonstrated that proactive law enforcement efforts can play a vital role in protecting taxpayers’ interests,” Barofsky said.
However the key issue that the committee wanted to focus on was the necessity for transparency and accountability, especially when addressing the challenges still facing the financial system and the economy.
“Under the TARP program, the Treasury put money into 707 banks, fewer than 10% of the small banks have managed to repay their TARP obligations, their problems are substantial,” Warren said. “Small banks face serious difficulties with the coming wave of commercial real estate loans and [they] do not have the same access to the capital that larger banks have.”
Barofsky said the lack of transparency being shown by the Department of Treasury is another issue that is concerning.
“I think that transparency is not for transparency sake, it makes the programs better and it makes them more credible,” he said. “By not documenting conversations or having formal negotiations it hurts the credibility of its programs in ways that are entirely unnecessary.”
Warren and Barofsky agreed that, under the TARP program, numerous strides at re-stabilizing the U.S. economy have yielded extremely positive results and in the future, hopefully with some realignment and accountability, the economy will be back on track.