Sylvie Dufeu has two adopted children, Manon, 7, from Mali, and Margot, 6, from Togo. “They’re great,” she said. “And we’re a very happy family.”

But the past week has been difficult. “You can feel the suspicion in people’s eyes when they see an African child with a white parent now. It is terrible.”

Mrs Dufeu, from Paris, is a victim of the fiasco caused by the French charity workers who said that they were going to rescue orphans from Darfur, only to be arrested and charged with kidnapping in Chad.

“I’m afraid this is going to discredit adoption from Africa as a whole,” she said. Her concerns are shared across Europe, where tens of thousands of childless families are engaged on what is often a desperate search for an international adoption.

There are more babies born in Nigeria in a year than in all of Western Europe combined, according to research from Procter & Gamble. Globally, there are 15 million Aids orphans, of whom 12 million are in Africa, according to Unicef.

Now the fear is that Africa will close its doors to European adoptions, amid the allegations of child-trafficking surrounding the scandal in Chad.

“There is already a great deal of misunderstanding over the issue in Africa,” said Mrs Dufeu, who runs Demisenya, an association for parents who adopt in Mali. “A lot of people think you are just looking for a maid on the cheap or something like that. My worry is that it will get worse after what has happened.”

Distrust has deepened after the Chadian authorities’ decision to prosecute six charity workers and 11 other Europeans over the failed attempt to fly 103 children out of the central African country.

Passions were further fuelled by inflammatory statements from Idriss Deby, the President of Chad, who called the operation “pure and simple abduction”. He suggested that the children could have ended up being sold to a paedophile ring or used to supply human organs. “These people . . . treat us like animals,” he said.

“I’ve had comments like ‘How much did you pay for that child’ and ‘I bet they’re not really orphans’,” Mrs Dufeu said. “It is pathetic to say those sort of things but people do.”

Zoe’s Ark, a small charity based near Paris set up by Eric Breteau, a former firefighter, claimed to have no interest in adoption. The charity said that its aim was to save 10,000 children whose parents had died in Darfur, the war-torn region of Sudan, and hand them to foster families in France and Europe.

But after the charity was stopped as it drove the first group of 103 in a bus to the airport in Abeche, near the Sudanese border in eastern Chad last month, its claims have unravelled.

The children are mainly from Chad, not Darfur. When question by representatives from Western NGOs in Chad, most of the children said that at least one of their parents was alive.

Their bandages were fake, designed to make them look like war victims when, in fact, they were unhurt. And the documents submitted by Zoe’s Ark to local officials made no mention of the flight to Europe, stating only that the children would be taken to a treatment centre in Abeche.

In France Mr Breteau’s claims to be promoting foster care have also been called into question after it emerged that he had recruited families by holding out the prospect of adoption. “Everyone interested in international adoptions in France knew about Zoe’s Ark,” said Gwendoline Guezelle. “It was a constant subject on adoption discussion forums on the web.”

Mrs Guezelle, who has one adopted daughter from Mali and is keen for a second, thought about paying the €2,400 (£1,650) demanded by Zoe’s Ark to join the charity herself.

“International adoption is so difficult and complicated that I can understand why people did it,” she said. “But I found the whole thing too ambiguous. You can’t mix up adoption and humanitarian work.”

Now Mrs Guezelle fears that her application to adopt a second Malian child, submitted in May, could be delayed. “The authorities in Mali recognise that adoption can often be the best solution but it is a very sensitive issue and this will create tensions, which is not good,” she said. “Mali stopped all international adoptions in 2004 after a child-trafficking scandal and I hope it doesn’t happen again.”

As many as 30,000 French people have been given authorisation to apply to adopt a child and an overwhelming majority are looking to do so abroad. About 8,000 new applications are submitted every year.

About 18 per cent of the foreign children adopted in France in 2006 were from Africa, notably from Ethiopia, Mali and Burkina Faso. But the number of foreign children being adopted in France is falling – from 4,136 in 2005 to 3,995 last year. “There are more and more candidates, fewer and fewer children and fiercer and fiercer competition between the countries which adopt,” said Yves Nicollin, head of the French Adoption Agency.

The competition looks set to be tougher after the Zoe’s Ark affair. Congo-Brazzaville stopped all international adoption after the controversy. Madagascar, which suspended procedures three years ago amid trafficking claims, may be tempted to reverse a decision to reopen them.

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