SEREKUNDA/JOHANNESBURG 17 May 2012 (IRIN) - In 2011, the rains failed in the Central River region of The Gambia, where Mawdou Danso, a farmer, struggled to raise a crop big enough to tide him over to the next harvest. He invested in an early-maturing, high-yielding rice called Nerica (New Rice for Africa), which had recently became available and promised to fit in well with the erratic rainfall patterns.
JOHANNESBURG 15 May 2012 (IRIN) - The UN Development Programme (UNDP) launched its first Africa Human Development Report today, stressing food security as a means to a better quality of life for all.
DAKAR 07 May 2012 (IRIN) - One day after being sworn in on 2 April, Senegal’s new President Macky Sall reversed months of public denial of the hunger affecting over 800,000 of his people - part of the Sahel-wide crisis affecting 16 million inhabitants - by calling on partners to help the country get food to those in need. UN agencies and NGOs are struggling to raise enough money to get programmes working so they can catch up with the steadily rising number of hungry people.
DAKAR/OUAGADOUGOU 04 May 2012 (IRIN) - Sahelian governments and local and international aid groups are struggling to cope with both the continual arrivals of people fleeing the regions of Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal in northern Mali, and the mounting number of hungry people across the region as the lean season gets underway.
JOHANNESBURG 25 April 2012 (IRIN) - The governance of natural resources like land, the oceans, rivers and the atmosphere, can affect the impact of some of the world’s biggest crises caused by natural events like droughts and floods. How best to manage those resources has been at the heart of the work by Nobel Prize winner (economics) Elinor Ostrom.
BUDALANGI 24 April 2012 (IRIN) - Joseph Mbima wades along submerged footpaths as he moves from homestead to homestead in the Bunyala area of western Kenya. His mission: to ask residents to evacuate their homes in the event of flash-flood warnings.
COLOMBO 19 April 2012 (IRIN) - Strong community awareness and preparedness are being cited for last week's successful evacuation of more than one million Sri Lankans after a tsunami alert was triggered by an 8.6 magnitude earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia.
KIGALI 18 April 2012 (IRIN) - Hundreds of people have been displaced and several killed by flash floods in the mountainous district of Musanze in northern Rwanda, and in the western districts of Nyabihu and Rubavu, say officials.
HAJJAH 18 April 2012 (IRIN) - Mines and other explosive remnants of war (ERW) have killed 27 people and injured at least 36 in the last two months in Hajjah Governorate, northwestern Yemen, according to a 14 April Interior Ministry report. Many of the injured will be left permanently disabled.
TILLABERI/NIAMEY 18 April 2012 (IRIN) - Small farmers in Oullam District in Niger’s western region of Tillaberi, faced with their third drought in seven years, are being forced to consider bundling up their few possessions and leaving for good the villages they have lived in all their lives.
JAKARTA 18 April 2012 (IRIN) - One week after a tsunami alert was issued along the western coast of Indonesia, leading disaster experts and agencies warn there is little room for complacency.
MAO 16 April 2012 (IRIN) - With drought conditions chronic in the Sahel, many farmers give up trying to grow crops and head to towns and cities to find work.
KAYES 13 April 2012 (IRIN) - “It was the drought that made people move away from here,” Ousmane Touré said in Kayes, 450km northwest of Bamako, the capital of Mali, and a 10-hour bus ride across the scorched scrubland of the western Sahel. “There had been a tradition of emigration, but it was when the harvests failed in the 1970s that we saw a real surge in emigration. There was simply not enough to eat, so people took off for France, Germany and the United States. They knew it was only the way of feeding their families back home in Kayes. The same thing is happening this year.”
BAMAKO 11 April 2012 (IRIN) - One week after the regions of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu in northern Mali were captured by rebel and Islamist groups, many Malians are trapped and have limited access to food and other basic necessities, while aid operations remain largely suspended.
DAKAR 05 April 2012 (IRIN) - After decades of failed Tuareg secessionist rebellions, a separatist group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) has declared an end to military operations in northern Mali, having achieved their objective: military control of the three regions of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu, which will form a new state. A separate Islamist group, Ansar Dine, which has different objectives from the MNLA and seeks to impose Sharia law in Mali, also took part in the fight and claims to have wrested control of Timbuktu from the MNLA - high tensions are reported between the two groups.
JOHANNESBURG 03 April 2012 (IRIN) - A Nobel laureate, a Swedish environmentalist’s idea, the “doughnut” concept, Scandinavia’s sense of social capital, measuring the quality of life, and valuing the oceans are just some of the things trending in the run-up to the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development due to be held on 20-22 June 2012.
BINGERVILLE/DAKAR 02 April 2012 (IRIN) - Unpredictable rainfall in parts of Côte d’Ivoire cost some farmers over half of their harvest in 2011 producers told IRIN, but, armed with more knowledge about how to get weather reports and interpret them, they might still have been able to boost their output, say agricultural specialists.
DUBAI 02 April 2012 (IRIN) - The Muslim world is increasingly in the “eye of the cyclone”, with disasters and crises affecting tens of millions of people in Muslim countries last year, a senior official with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) told a humanitarian conference in Dubai.
JOHANNESBURG 02 April 2012 (IRIN) - People often use “coping” and “adapting” interchangeably in the context of disaster response - an issue the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seeks to address in its new report.
HARGEISA 30 March 2012 (IRIN) - Officials in the self-declared republic of Somaliland, northwestern Somalia, are appealing for food aid and potable water for thousands of families who have lost their livelihoods in the current drought.
YANGON 29 March 2012 (IRIN) - Access for international aid workers in Myanmar shows signs of improving, but aid workers say huge challenges remain.
KAEDI 29 March 2012 (IRIN) - Hunger has come again to the Sahel. “Since yesterday I have only drunk water,” said Houley Dia, 60, a widow who lives in Houdallah, a village of the Fula ethnic group in southern Mauritania on the border with Senegal. “I have lived through hard times before - no rain, animal diseases, locust swarms - but this year is worse than ever,” she told IRIN.
DAKAR 28 March 2012 (IRIN) - Mali is facing its “worst humanitarian crisis for 20 years” due to a combination of food insecurity affecting around three million people, and conflict-induced displacement in the north.
JOHANNESBURG 27 March 2012 (IRIN) - The apocalyptic vision presented on cinema screens of a world devoid of food (Hunger Games) or with too much water (Waterworld) as a result of climate change, is not as far-fetched as some may think.
NAROK 26 March 2012 (IRIN) - Along a small seasonal stream in Ewaso Nyiro village in Narok, southwestern Kenya, Leleseina Nkoitoi sells vegetables from a stall whose bright colours contrast with the parched landscape.
