Oxfam uses vouchers to support Niger food markets

In a hard-hitting report the aid agency admits that famine relief is often too late and too costly.

The report comes hot on the heels of a UN warning that the poorest nations are at a "critical moment of transition".

Oxfam argues that emergency aid has distracted attention from the pressing need for long-term investment.

Niger crisis

Food aid has increased in recent years, Oxfam said, but most of it is imported. This means it can take months to deliver and can cost up to 50% more than locally purchased goods.

Lauren Gelfand, a West Africa-based Oxfam official, spoke to the BBC News website from Niger where a renewed humanitarian crisis is brewing.

"Infrastructure here needs very, very basic aid, such as help with agricultural irrigation techniques," Ms Gelfand said.

She described the kind of aid that would make a profound and lasting impact as "very low-tech, small-scale projects".

Ms Gelfand pointed out that while aid from the European Union helps fund emergency treatment centres, this is often "very much a band-aid response rather than addressing the root causes of poverty".

Long-term view

Late rains and rising cereal prices have combined with drastic reductions in the value of livestock to create a food crisis in Niger that threatens to be worse than last year's emergency in the region, Ms Gelfand said.

Oxfam believes that sustained investment in these communities will eventually remove the need for aid.

The report emphasises that warfare is the cause of more than half of Africa's food crises, triggering situations like the current one in Darfur where 3.4m people rely on food aid.

HIV/Aids and climate change have further undermined African economies as agricultural workers succumb to disease and nomadic farmers lose crops to rising temperatures.

Practical answers

Among the schemes that Oxfam thinks can make a difference are livestock purchase deals which it operates in Kenya.

Animals are bought and slaughtered with the meat shared among the community while the owner is free to sell the skin.

In Niger, Oxfam ploughs aid money back into the local economy through vouchers that villagers can spend at local livestock fairs.

Oxfam wants major aid donors like the US to review the pattern of their food aid spending.

Structural imbalance

The organisation believes that a concerted shift to spending aid money on local produce rather than paying farmers in the developed world for foodstuffs is the only way to break a cycle of dependence that has emerged in Africa.

Humanitarian assistance to Africa more than trebled between 1997 and 2003, rising from $946m to over $3bn (�1.6bn).

But this increase masks a sharp decline in the proportion of aid money delivered to regional agricultural development programmes, Oxfam says.

Agricultural production aid to Sub-Saharan Africa fell from $1.7bn between 1990-1992 to $974m between 2000-2002.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development, known as Unctad, called for more wealth creation for the poorest countries last week.

Unctad warned that during the past decade aid had shifted away from boosting infrastructure and economic production.

Both Oxfam and Unctad have repeated calls for wealthy nations to honour their pledges made at last year's G8 Summit in Gleneagles to boost aid to the most needy nations to $50bn.