British Public Wants Early Alert to Food Crises

Three quarters of Britons would like to see news coverage of food crises in the developing world at the early stages and said it was up to the media to inform them, a poll by Care International said on Wednesday.

Many food crises in Africa and elsewhere develop slowly and predictably, with rains failing and crops failing months before the food actually runs out and acute malnutrition sets in. But journalists and film crews often only after people start dying.

Aid workers complain by that stage it is much more expensive to help people. Need may be so acute that airdrops are needed instead of truck deliveries and children require pricey and difficult therapeutic feeding to regain dangerously lost weight.

In the early stages of the 2005 Niger food crisis, Care said it would only have cost a dollar a day to keep a malnourished child fed. By the time the crisis reached its peak, it cost $80.

"We assume that the public just want to get a simple basic message but actually people who give to charities think about what they are doing," Carol Monoyios, marketing director of Care International UK, told Reuters.

"We have a responsibility to give them the full picture and not be apologetic about it."

Care said 68 percent of 1,003 adults surveyed said they would rather give money in advance of an emergency to help prevent it than donate after the event.

Almost three quarters said it was the media's responsibility to inform them about emergencies earlier so something could be done.

Currently the United Nations World Food Programme is concerned about rising food shortages from drought or conflict -- or both -- in Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Chad and Central African Republic.

Care said it was important long term development programmes addressed the root causes of food shortages. But agricultural development in particular is often not seen as a glamorous or newsworthy subject.

Aid experts increasingly say simply rushing in food aid to African countries every couple of years when crops fail does little to address long-term issues of deepening poverty, HIV and climate change.

"We have to be able to say the problem is chronic and it's going to get worse and worse if we don't intervene," Monoyios said.

"It doesn't take more than a couple of minutes to explain but you do need to get across that slightly more complex message."