Where is the food?

Burkina Faso: Food Shortages Leave Families on the Brink of Crisis

Within this article it talks about how the Sahel, a band of countries spanning the north of Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea is going through a huge crisis of where their food to put on the table will be coming from next. Also in the days, months, years before the food shortages started happening the Sahel had high rates of malnutrition among this region already. It mentions, “ Burkina Faso is among the ten poorest countries in the world according to the UN Human Development Index”. Burkina Faso is a country in West Africa, which it is also in the Sahel region. Throughout this country, almost a third of children under the age of five are affected by chronic malnutrition and ten percent encounter acute malnutrition. Within Burkina Faso, the Burkinabe Red Cross has made a major impact on the citizens. They started many community nutrition committees. These committees help release pressure on health centers that screen for malnutrition and provide education to mothers by informing them on the best ways to use the available resources. With these committees providing the same care as the health centers, more mothers are reached in time and more lives are saved. Along with the Burkinabe Red Cross, the Belgian Red Cross has been working also with the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO). These larger organizations have been able to go into villages, which are isolated, and help those who have been hit by this disaster.

Reading this article there was nothing that I had seen that was bad. You have a country that is doing anything that they can to educate and help the people who live there to turn around this crisis. To know that the rates have reduced significantly shows that these organizations know what they are doing. They are not throwing options at the people that are out of the ordinary and leaving them out to dry. It shows that the organizations and the government of the country care about their people and are there always to help them. With this help lives are saved.

Kayla Howard

Submitted: February 22, 2013 12:50pm

Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201302221008.html