#Mauritania’s Emergency Food Programme Under Fire

By Mohamed Abderrahmane

The sun is beating down on Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, and Habi Amadou Tidjane Diop is a tired and frustrated woman. Seated on an empty upturned bucket, the mother of nine is waiting in a long queue to buy food.

“I got here early because it’s Thursday and I need to buy groceries for both today and Friday – four kilogrammes of rice, two kilos of sugar, four kg of pasta and two litres of oil,” Diop told IPS.

The shop, in the Medina 3 neighbourhood of the capital, is one of 400 set up across the city to sell staple foods to the city’s poorest residents at subsidised prices. The manager, Sidi Ould Aly, explained that it’s part of the government’s nationwide “Programme Emel 2012”, intended to reduce the impact of a drought which has driven food prices beyond the buying power of many people in this arid West African country.

Figures released in 2010 by Mauritania’s National Statistics Office put the country’s poverty rate at 42 percent. This already vulnerable nation is now experiencing severe food insecurity, according to a report published by the World Food Programme (WFP) in December 2011. The WFP estimated that by the end of last year, 800,000 Mauritanians were in the grip of a food crisis linked to drought.

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