CAIRO, August 11, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – The famine crisis in Niger is not the result of food shortages only, but also vendor profiteering, a government policy shift toward a free market and a decline in the traditional culture of generosity, a leading US paper reported Thursday, August 11.

In a country adopting free market policies, the paper said, the suffering caused by a poor harvest has been dramatically compounded by a surge in food prices and profiteering by a burgeoning community of traders.

Those traders, in recent years, have been freed from government price controls and other mechanisms that once balanced market forces, it added.

A government spokesman, Ben Omar Mohamed, told the daily from Niamey that the government has provided 42,000 tons of free and subsidized food to ease hunger.

In Maradi, however, there is little evidence of official food distribution, the paper said.

Capturing the obstacles people in the Niger are facing during their daily search for food in the poor country, The Washington Post also highlighted the lost culture of generosity that once helped communities in Niger survive cyclical periods of scarcity.

Many residents in Niger told the paper that the tradition of sharing in their society is giving way to sharper, more selfish attitudes as Niger, one of the world's poorest countries, reaches for a more materialistic, Westernized future.

"There are people who are making profit out of this whole situation," Abdoulkader Mamane Idi, a local radio journalist, told the daily.

"The link of brotherhood and solidarity has been broken."

In 1993, the government scrapped price controls at the urging of the World Bank.

Rachida Abdou is one of many other hungry mothers with breasts shriveled from malnourishment and skeletal babies strapped to their backs, who went to search for food only to find out that there are plenty, though not affordable.

She tied her shrunken baby girl to her back and grabbed the emaciated hand of her 7-year-old son, and together, they set out in search of food, or for somebody who might help, according to the paper.

"On the fifth day of their journey, they stumbled into Maradi, a trading center, where, Abdou recounted, they saw something that they hadn't encountered in a very long time: food.

"There were sacks of rice, bags of peanuts and baskets of millet in the bustling markets."

There was enough food -- here in the epicenter of a major hunger crisis -- to feed her family and thousands like it, if only they had the cash, the paper said.

"What can you do?" Abdou, a tall woman of about 30 with dark, piercing eyes, told the Post in a frustrated and a bit desperate sound.

"The price of millet is very high."

Food peddlers in Maradi's central markets, according to the paper, say they would have no trouble ordering more from their suppliers.

"There's plenty," said Hamissu Garba, 30, a trader.

Garba's shop is stocked with luxuries such as instant coffee and 110-pound bags of rice, once priced at $20 and now selling for $35.

Millet and other commodities have doubled or even tripled in price, the paper said.

"Maradi hums with commercial prosperity: there are televisions and cell phones, as well as shoes and shirts, larger shops are piled with sacks of grain, which men buy in bulk and then sell by the bowl and hordes of healthy-looking goats parade down dirt streets, prodded by herders."

But traders in Maradi deny profiting on the suffering of their countrymen, saying they are only passing along the higher costs charged by out-of-town suppliers, according to the Washington Post.

They said the crisis has actually hurt business because people can't afford the prices.

"It's very, very expensive, more than what one would think," Garba said. "Nobody is making a profit out of it."

"People are coming, but it's difficult," said another trader, Sadissa Issaka, 28.

He added that he would welcome the government purchase of his stocks to subsidize the market but that he couldn't afford to donate food.

"That's people's property. They can't just give it away," he said. "It's the duty of the government to do so, but unfortunately it has not."

A UN report found that prices in markets in Niger have shot up sharply because of profiteering, James Morris, executive director of the UN World Food Program, told the paper.

Some traders, he added, have raised prices in anticipation of the arrival of aid groups, which often buy food locally to save on transport costs.

In the mostly Muslim nation, where the wealthy have a religious duty to set aside a portion of their income for the poor, some Islamic leaders told the Post fewer and fewer are bothering to do so.

"There is nothing like generosity now," said Malan Hassane, the imam of a neighborhood mosque.

"Selfishness is gaining ground," he said, insisting that humanitarian groups would not need to intervene if people here were more willing to feed one another.

"When a Muslim pays his Zakah or spends something in charity, his soul is purified from miserliness and he rises to the peaks of magnanimity and honor. This very act of spending money in charity and Zakah is a great sign of showing gratitude to Almighty Allah.

"Showing our gratitude is by doing good to others, by helping the poor and by spending in Allah cause. "

Drought and severe locust invasion last year has left some 3.6 million people in this country of 11.3 million faced with severe food shortages.

Children in Niger, the second-poorest country in the world, are most at risk, with some 800,000 aged under 5 years need to be fed urgently.

Longer-term economic policies may be working against a solution, The Washington Post quoted some observers as saying.

In 1993, the government scrapped price controls at the urging of the World Bank and stopped heavy-handed interventions in grain markets by an import-export agency.

Ben Omar Mohamed acknowledged that prices have risen sharply but said the government was attempting to address the problem.

"Absolutely, traders are making money because the demand is very high," he said. "We let the market determine the price."