Focusing on long-term sustainability is vital, Mark Snelling is told

Mark Snelling is a member of the British Red Cross Society's Emergency Response Unit in Niger.

He has been keeping a diary for the BBC News website.

In his fourth entry, Mark describes how everything is in place for large-scale distribution of food and equipment to begin.

Back in Niamey, and the full logistical machine steps up a gear.

The first three of nine flights of food and equipment are arriving today.

The first, an Ilyshin-76 carrying 41 metric tonnes of enriched Unimix flour and oil from the French Red Cross, got in just after 0600.

Wide-scale food distribution is now starting to get through

Miranda Bradley, our systems delegate, and Isabelle Sechaud, the Federation Logistics Coordinator, are up at the crack of dawn to go and meet it.

There will be two more today; one bringing medical supplies, the other loaded with trucks and Landcruisers.

Over the next two weeks, there will be more trucks and medical equipment, along with the urgently needed Unimix, 244 tonnes of the stuff.

This is what all the preparation has been leading up to, the deployment, the planning, the assessments.

The structure is in place and the large scale distributions will start over the next couple of days.

We got the first distribution under way on Monday in Tahoua, but this is the full force of the response.

The British Red Cross has pledged to supply the general food rations to the families of the children admitted to our Supplementary Feeding Centres.

Each operational base already has 160 tonnes of World Food Programme millet and lentils to start with.

Whatever the wider questions, this is an extraordinary and impressive operation.

Peter Pearce, the leader of our Emergency Response Unit (ERU), went to Mali on Monday to assess the situation there and what help we could provide.

As welcome as the attention on Niger is, we are identifying the danger that it will leave neighbouring countries to struggle alone with the crisis.

The team fear a similar crisis could brew in neighbouring Mali

Peter is organising an assessment around Timbuktu, aimed at assisting Tuareg nomads who did not receive free distributions of food organised by the government in recent months.

He is excited by the project and asks me to come along.

So a few quick phone calls later, I'm off again.

I hitch a lift with Javier, who's heading back to Niamey. We stop off on the way to discuss volunteer training at one of the feeding centre locations near Maradi, and continue straight on to the capital.

It is an eight-hour drive, skirting the Nigerian border to our left and the vast interior of Niger to our right.

Javier is pleased with the way the response has come together so far, although he still wonders why their appeals were not listened to last year. There will need to be answers.

The Maradi team set off for more meetings with local aid officials.

Training of volunteers for the feeding centres is about to begin.

Neil is working with two delegates from the Spanish Red Cross, Javier Medrano Adan and Lorenzo Violante Ruiz.

Their projects have been running here for two years.

The youngest in Niger are still the most at risk

Javier tells me they put in a funding application for supplementary feeding centres in October last year. They saw this coming.

But they were turned down by donors on the grounds that there were other priorities.

We finally get the Bgan satellite dish working, and I get online for the first time since we arrived.

There has been a coup in Mauritania; after Niger, it is probably the hungriest country in the region. A coup is not what they need.

Back in Niger, it is Independence Day. The French pulled out on 3 August 1960.

Compared to so many other countries in Africa, democracy here is actually in pretty good shape. There is a lot of which they can be proud.

Once the distribution was up and running on Monday, it was back on the road south to Maradi, another of our main feeding centres.

I drove down with Dr Guy Zimmerman, a Red Cross doctor from Geneva who specialises in nutrition and epidemiology.

He explained the urgent requirement to look at long-term sustainability here once the emergency has passed.

We can feed the vulnerable children, he says, but food alone will not solve their dire predicament.

Chronic malnutrition and inadequate health care have stunted the growth of so many for so long, there will need to be far more than stabilising food distributions. And he will plan the response accordingly.

Mark answers some of your questions about the situation in Niger.

What are your views on preventing this type of catastrophe? Could this crisis have been prevented? From Ranil Dhammapala, Sri Lanka

A first point to make is that for many people in Niger, a truly acute crisis has been prevented.

The Red Cross will stabilise some 23,000 children, moderately malnourished under fives, before they fall into a life-threatening state.

Our colleagues in organisations such as MSF are doing a truly impressive job in bringing thousands of severely malnourished children back from the brink of death.

Having said that, there are many questions now being asked about the systems that we have in place to monitor and react to crises such as this, before they turn into emergencies.

My British Red Cross team, for instance, is an Emergency Response Unit, so we are only called when a general emergency is declared.

The challenge, I think, is to address these kinds of situations before that happens.

The indicators of an approaching hunger crisis are not difficult to read.

What can happen however, is that there is reluctance to act on a situation in order to prevent it.

The media plays a part in this, and it is paradoxical.

Although it is often media reports that play a part in setting an aid response in motion, it is also the media's need for a sensational crisis that makes it so hard to publicise looming emergencies and to find the funding to prevent them.

I was a journalist for many years, and I can tell you that it would be hard to persuade a news editor to send a TV crew to cover the pre-emptive prevention of an humanitarian emergency.

There is no point in getting into a game of blame and finger-pointing, absolutely none at all. That will help no one.

Everybody involved in the humanitarian world and the media has to take responsibility for the part they play.

We need to discuss this in a structured way; we need to figure it out.

Are the DEC member NGOs cooperating well or are they duplicating their efforts? How are supplies reaching the villages and are they getting to the people who need it? From Lianne Kennedy, NY

An enormous amount of work in the field is put into coordination between the various humanitarian agencies here.

No assessment is complete without in-depth discussions with other organisations to ensure that no one is showing up in the same place to do the same thing.

It is the worst mistake that you can make in an operation of this kind, and we are all dedicated to avoiding it.

The arrival of the main bulk of the food aid, which began on Friday, has been preceded by extremely careful planning and assessment.

In the Red Cross, we have collaborated closely with local government officials, the Health Ministry, as well as the Niger Red Cross, in identifying the precise areas of the greatest need.

The logistical preparations, have now installed a highly efficient pipeline from aircraft to truck to feeding centre.

As I wrote a few days ago, one cannot simply arrive and start throwing food off the back of a lorry. People could get killed that way.

We have to know that we are registering those most in need and distributing accordingly.

That phase of the operation is now largely complete and the framework is in place.

We know who we are distributing to, where that is going to happen and how we are going to do it.

Given the number of lives at stake, there is no room for guesswork here.

Do you have any questions about the relief effort or want Mark to explain anything in his diary? Then drop him a line using the form below.

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