From the India Times... (hence the British spelling)
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) now aims to provide emergency rations to 2.5 million people compared with the 1.2 million it said it aimed to help last week, reflecting a major increase in the scale of its response.

"We are increasing the number to 2.5 million as more and more people’s coping mechanisms are running short," said WFP spokeswoman Stefanie Savariaud. "In this kind of operation, it’s inevitable that the number of beneficiaries increases," she said.

Relief workers treating children dying from hunger after drought and locusts wiped out last year’s harvest say the United Nations, the government and other agencies should have started such large-scale emergency food aid much earlier.

UN officials said early in July they would start the current type of emergency food distribution only as a last resort, fearing that acting prematurely could upset local food markets and encourage a damaging dependency on aid.
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Am I reading this correctly? This is all based on what happened at harvest time last October!!??

Are we seriously willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of lives to prevent "upsetting local food markets"?

There is a lot of shame and blame to spread around in this tragedy...but unless I missed it, the last time our President talked about Niger, it was to accuse them of being traders in nuclear fuel to Saddam.

Why do we have to see the wasting bodies of children before we do anything? When the locusts came and the crops failed last fall, why didn't the UN and the various NGO's start planning? Sure we all got distracted by the Tsunami...but this famine was perfectly predictable 10 months ago.

What is going on?