The NGO Action Against Hunger makes the sound of hunger in the Sahel audible through a video that conveys what 5 million children experience as the hardest season of the year arrives.
[vimeo url="https://vimeo.com/210742258″]
The succession of seasons is a natural phenomenon – but not in this case. From June to September, in the Sahel – the region of Africa that separates the Sahara desert to the north from the savanna to the south, stretching across the continent from east to west – it is the hunger season. And this year the situation is made worse by the refugee crisis caused by Boko Haram violence in northern Nigeria and by extremist groups in northern Mali. As a result, the number of displaced people has reached 4.9 million – a record for the past five years – on top of the more than 970,000 refugees already present in the region. These are people who fled with nothing, many of whom are still moving in search of a safe place.
Another driver of hunger is the dysfunction of the local food market, where prices rise when farmers have exhausted their stocks and demand is high. This year has seen the highest peaks in the past five years in Niger, Mali and Mauritania. Nomadic herders are the hardest hit by the hunger season, owing to a shortage of pastureland and a fall in the price of goats caused by reduced demand from Nigeria, which has contracted their purchasing power.
It is a complex situation that Action Against Hunger – the international humanitarian organisation that provides drinking water, food, medical care and training to people in need in almost 50 countries worldwide – has sought to encapsulate in the video The sound of hunger. Together with the European Commission, the NGO has launched an awareness campaign to make the sound of hunger "audible" and perceptible – a seasonal phenomenon that every year puts the lives of five million children in the Sahel at risk – and to mobilise the efforts needed to silence it.
