Niger, a landlocked nation of 11.7 million, suffers through hunger crises about once every decade. The sandy soil holds water poorly, and only one acre in 30 is considered arable. A short rainy season can be disastrous for a country of subsistence farmers, and last year, farmers faced both a lack of rain and an infestation of locusts.
Yet this time, unlike during earlier food shortages, the market economy has remained vibrant.
Hundreds of miles from a major port, trading routes are well established, coming from the capital, Niamey, in the west and from Nigeria in the south. Food peddlers in Maradi's central markets say they would have no trouble ordering more from their suppliers.
"There's plenty," said Hamissu Garba, 30, a trader with a round face and a belly that bulged beneath his shirt. Garba's shop is stocked with luxuries such as instant coffee and 110-pound bags of rice, once priced at $20 and now selling for $35.
Millet and other commodities have doubled or even tripled in price.
Maradi hums with commercial prosperity. In ramshackle wooden stalls, there are televisions and cell phones, as well as shoes and shirts. Larger shops are piled with sacks of grain, which men buy in bulk and then sell by the bowl. Hordes of healthy-looking goats parade down dirt streets, prodded by herders.
But traders in Maradi deny profiting on the suffering of their countrymen, saying they are only passing along the higher costs charged by out-of-town suppliers. They said the crisis has actually hurt business because people can't afford the prices.
"It's very, very expensive, more than what one would think," Garba said. "Nobody is making a profit out of it."
"People are coming, but it's difficult," said another trader, Sadissa Issaka, 28. He said that he would welcome the government purchase of his stocks to subsidize the market but that he couldn't afford to donate food. "That's people's property. They can't just give it away," he said. "It's the duty of the government to do so, but unfortunately it has not."
A government spokesman, Ben Omar Mohamed, said from Niamey that the government has provided 42,000 tons of free and subsidized food to ease hunger. In Maradi, however, there is little evidence of official food distribution.
Longer-term economic policies may be working against a solution, according to some observers. In 1993, the government scrapped price controls at the urging of the World Bank and stopped heavy-handed interventions in grain markets by an import-export agency.
Mohamed acknowledged that prices have risen sharply but said the government was attempting to address the problem. "Absolutely, traders are making money because the demand is very high," he said. "We let the market determine the price."
Abdou said she has experienced the bitter effects of change in both Niger's economic forces and traditional culture.
Before she left her village, she sold all three of her dresses for a total of $6. Wearing a borrowed dress, she spent $2 on bus fare for the first leg of the journey, $2 to have her son examined at a clinic and $2 for six pounds of millet that once would have cost four times less.
After that was gone, Abdou said, she and her children survived on the few morsels they could beg from passersby on the journey. Her son continued to waste away, stumbling and often falling. As the desperate family walked along the streets of Maradi on Wednesday, few rose to help.
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