The Least Green Country On Earth

Without water, the locals can't build infrastructure that would bring education, health care or employment. Fifty percent of Niger's population has no access to basic health care, according to a 2006 study. Kirtley conducted an improvised survey of health awareness and was shocked by the results. "Not one of the people I interviewed had heard of HIV/AIDS," she says. One little girl's face had swelled up so much she had trouble breathing. The culprit? An unwashed pimple.

Nutrition is lacking, too. As water diminishes, livestock herds have shrunk, which means less meat and milk to go around. With farms failing, many Nigerois rely on wild plants. In the village of Saroki Soulay, vendors at a local market were unloading a truck of huge sacks of leaves, from which people make a staple sauce. "The dependence on wild products is an effective indicator of low levels of well-being," says a recent U.N. report on the Sahel.

With such vast challenges, the government has taken a shotgun approach to development, with some success. Child mortality figures have dropped slightly, access to clean water has improved, and several thousand small clinics have opened in some of the most inaccessible areas. The government would also like to see industrial-scale farming, modern machinery and large-scale irrigation projects replace small-scale agriculture, which worries some experts. Government officials "believe the modernization of the agricultural sector is the pathway out of poverty," says Ced Hesse, director of the drylands program at the International Institute for Environment and Development. "There's less emphasis on how do you help the small farmer that represents 80 percent of the population." And with just over a decade of democracy under its belt, Niger is struggling to stay politically stable. Even as China invested $5 billion in June in an oil exploration and prospecting deal, Touareg rebels in the north threatened to attack, briefly kidnapping four French nationals working on uranium mining to protest the government's refusal to negotiate with them.

There's not much relief on the horizon. By 2050, the population is expected to have quadrupled again, to 55 million. Before that, "you could very soon have a tipping point in which you have just too many people, too much livestock," says the United Nations' Egeland. "Then you will suddenly see child mortality go from normally unacceptable levels to exceptionally horrific levels." As global warming threatens food supplies throughout the world, nowhere is the hunger crisis edging closer to catastrophe than in Niger.

© 2008