By Nellie Peyton
Hundreds of thousands of people in Senegal and Mauritania are at risk of going hungry in the coming year because not enough grass has grown to feed the region’s cattle, analysts said on Friday.
Satellite maps show barren pastures across large swaths of the two West African countries, which means animals will die, robbing owners of their sole source of food and income.
A similar lack of pasture in 2017 left 5 million people needing food aid the subsequent year across six countries in West Africa’s Sahel region, a grassy zone below the Sahara desert.
There are not yet estimates of the number of people who could be affected by the current situation, but in some areas it looks worse than 2017, said Zakari Saley Bana, a disaster risk reduction advisor for the charity Action Against Hunger (ACF).
About 350,000 families depend on cattle herding in Senegal, according to a pastoralists’ association…Read more>>
