NIGER? WHERE'S THAT?
The flooding in Pakistan seizes the imagination. Valley after valley is threatened, militants might take advantage of the chaos to win people's hearts and mind by supplying aid, nuclear weapons might begin circulating to terrorists if refugees rose up against the current government, and as a matter of universal humanitarian concern, millions of lives could be lost.
So I went looking for articles about Niger, and found nothing. Nothing on Yahoo news, nothing on CNN. This was disheartening, but not surprising: on other occasions I have expresses my contempt for my supposed colleagues in the national press, who settle on misleading versions of things that will make their jobs easier by being simple to repeat, and who seem to have that same amazing instinct that lets a huge flock of pigeons veer to a different course and in moments take over some unexpected location, which their slimy effluvia will soon befoul.
At last, using Google, I found something from Georgia Public Radio, which had subscribed to the reporting of National Public Radio and had put it online was well as broadcasting it on Aug. 20. From time to time, the British Broadcasting Corporation news hour program to which Vermont Public Radio subscribes mentions the situation in and around Niger as well.
That's right, Public Radio, those barely American socialist subversives who have JUST NOT GOT IT YET that Fox News is right about GETTING ANGRY, REALLY ANGRY as the indispensable foundation for righteous change. Public Radio, which speaks with calm voices and leans on facts. Those intellectuals, who are so carried away promoting their hidden liberal agenda that they don't have any common sense.
No, I'm not wasting your time by saying that. I'm repeating what must be repeated again and again until it sinks in: like the Dunkin Donuts pledge, "because it can never be said enough, I will make my donuts fresh every four hours."
Let's see, what were we talking about?
Niger. Which is pronounced nee-JAIR, not like the N word, and is not the same country as Nigeria. The Niger River slices through the far southwestern part of Niger, on its way from Mali to Nigeria, providing the only fertile land in a country the New York Times in 2005 called the world's second-poorest. For the record, this inland sub-Saharan nation, about four-fifths the size of Alaska, shares boundaries with (going more or less clockwise) Mali, Algeria, Libya, Chad, Nigeria, Benin and Burkina Faso.
News from Niger is almost always bad. The country was making headlines and generating front page photos in 2005 because a massive famine and locust invasion threatened to kill millions. Prior to the Iraq War, a trumped-up account that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy "yellow cake" uranium from Niger ignited a huge controversy; the sensationalistic aspects of the situation kept news outlets from emphasizing that uranium mining had once been one of Niger's main economic supports, but it was in steep decline, worsening other problems for the country.
Worst of all, one of the most reliable predictions regarding global warming is that the tropical zone will expand, and that will push the arid bands on both sides of the tropical zone farther to the north and south. Niger, whose northerly portions are desert and whose more inhabited areas are part of the sub-Saharan Sahel region, has proven to be a classic case. As one information atlas put it, "The largely agrarian and subsistence-based economy is frequently disrupted by extended droughts common to the Sahel region of Africa."
While Pakistanis fight for their lives against flooding, inhabitants of the desertifying sections of Niger quietly starve. The drought is so bad that in addition to losing main agricultural crops like millet, the agricultural regions are losing the forage needed to maintain their animals-which in that culture constitute the main form of wealth. And because climatic events are no respecters of borders, nearby parts of Chad, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Nigeria are suffering the same plight. In Niger alone, according to United Nations sources, nearly 8 million people, or about half of the country's population, are at risk.
In the capital city of Niamey, the Oxfam relief organization's representative Caroline Gluck was reported as saying, "They have had to sell what few animals they had remaining in order to buy food stocks, but the food prices are rising, and tens of thousands of livestock have actually starved to death," she said. "So people are in a precarious situation, and they're desperate."
It would be easy to chalk all this up to the First World's chronic neglect of Africa, but the problem may be donor fatigue rather than donor inattention. Too many graphic pictures of babies suffering from malnutrition have a way of making viewers think "Too many babies" as well as "Too little food."
Sooner or later, two or more major crises in the Third or Fourth World will coincide in a way that brings, without anyone exactly intending it, the deaths of millions. Amidst worsening weather due to climate change, a worsening economy that can't grow out of its stagnation because there is no longer the global habitat for such growth, chronic corruption brought on by generations of inopportunity, the prevalence of literally suicidal violence as a terrorist tactic, wild card threats like invasive crop pests and resistant human resistant diseases, crushing pollution, embattled resources, and First World revulsion at the size of the deficits brought on by those countries own gluttonous indulgences, the moment will come when urgency collapses in exhaustion and good will is too weak to bring urgency back to its feet. Factual matters of logistics will dictate, as pitilessly as mathematical calculations, that the long-awaited global triage has begun.
But if all it does is send more souls to Heaven, who cares?
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