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By Henri Astier BBC News website
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Dramatic pictures publicised Niger's plight in June
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When Niger's president accused aid agencies of exaggerating his country's food crisis for their own gain, Western media reacted with shock.
How dare he bite the hand that feeds his people, commentators asked. Many suggested the president was making excuses for the failings of his own government. But according to some leading aid experts, Mamadou Tandja had a point. His remarks may have been self-serving, they concede, but they also raised serious issues about the way aid emergencies are handled. "I think NGOs and rich country media do have an incentive to paint too simplistic and bleak a picture, as was the case in Niger's food crisis," Professor William Easterly of New York University told the BBC News website.
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 My concern about this is you either have an aid bonanza or you have nothing 
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There were localised food shortages this year - but they were not particularly acute, and are now easing. What Niger is experiencing is not a sudden catastrophe, but chronic malnutrition that makes people vulnerable to rises in food prices. Glib talk of famine backed by pictures of starving children may help NGOs raise funds, but it does nothing to address these basic problems, says Mr Easterly.
Tony Vaux, a former official with Oxfam, agrees. Once an emergency is identified, he says, the NGOs' public relations machine takes over and "there is a terrible temptation to look around for the very worst stories"
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President Tandja caused an outcry when he criticised NGOs
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"My concern about this is you either have an aid bonanza or you have nothing. There does not seem to be a middle ground," says Mr Vaux, author of the book The Selfish Altruist. One problem with dramatic appeals, Mr Easterly notes, is that they do not give you a big bang for your aid buck.
"The payoff is disappointingly low," he says. Getting the relief effort up and running takes time, and when the food arrives it is often too late - or the crisis has eased on its own, as appears to be the case in Niger. Emergency aid may relieve the situation - but the same amount spent before children starved in front of the cameras would have saved many more lives. Such poor returns were illustrated by the 2002 southern Africa "crisis".
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Sometimes aid agencies overplay figures in order to sustain themselves
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After rains failed the UN warned that millions were at risk. Camera crews looked for starving babies and found some. The aid bandwagon charged ahead. But Zambia, worried that the US maize it was receiving might be genetically modified, banned all aid - unwittingly providing an interesting experiment. Donors were aghast. But then something strange happened: nothing. "Cutting off supplies had no impact," former Zambian agriculture minister Guy Scott says.
There was no famine - only local shortages Zambia could deal with. "NGOs flatter themselves into thinking that they save lives," says Mr Scott, who finds it "arrogant of the West to think that without whites, without pops star, Africans would all be dead". The West tends not only to overstate the effectiveness of aid, but also to underestimate its harmful effects.
Too much of a good thing?
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A bonanza often undermine self-reliance. "It is axiomatic that flooding the market with food drives down the price for local farmers," Mr Easterly says.
James Shikwati, who heads the Inter Region Economic Network, a Kenyan NGO, says drought aid to his country in the 1990s "killed production" in many areas and increased dependency. Aid can also encourage misguided policies. Mr Shikwati says this has been the case in Ethiopia, where farmers are not allowed to own land. Instead of introducing reforms, he notes, the government appeals for aid. When donors respond, Mr Shikwati says, "they are subsidising a government policy that makes it difficult for people to be productive". Likewise, it can be argued that aid sent to Niger has helped obscure the role played by its neighbours in the crisis. Nigeria and others - violating regional treaties - have banned grain exports to Niger, which in normal times would have alleviated shortages.
What is to be done? - Mr Easterly and others are not arguing that the solution to perverse incentives lies in withholding emergency aid. They contend that it could be made to work better in a number of ways, including:
- Providing compensation to local farmers
- Making sure aid stops when things improve
- Giving cash rather than food
But the most effective move would be to focus less on emergencies and more on chronic problems. Mr Easterly says this could be done cheaply in the Sahel. improving access to clean water and distributing re-hydration tablets, for instance, would help eradicate diarrhoea, which drains nutrients away and makes children particularly vulnerable.
Tony Vaux, for his part, calls on the media to present a balanced picture of the situation of the ground, and not see their role as promoting the NGOs public appeals. But he does not hold out much hope. "When I first joined Oxfam in 1972 there was a famine in the Sahel, exactly like the famine today," he recalls. Three decades and umpteen appeals later the same emergencies keep recurring, he says ruefully.
