FOR thousands of hungry children in Niger today, a tiny plastic bracelet in red, yellow or blue could be a passport to the future.

The bands around their shrunken wrists and ankles allow them and their mothers to receive special food handouts. For many that extra food will make the difference between life and death.

For aid workers the bracelets represent an ironic contrast with those worn symbolically by Western supporters of the Make Poverty History campaign.

Across this vast, drought- hit country, where the United Nations says that 150,000 children could die soon, youngsters queue for admission to a handful of hastily set up emergency feeding centres, their mothers desperately holding them out like ringed migratory birds.

Those without the bracelets must wait for another day but, in a land of severe food shortages, that day may never come.

“For many it is already too late and things are likely to get worse before they get better. We are now moving into some difficult months,” said Johanne Sekkenes, the head in Niger of the medical charity Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), which focuses on support for malnourished children.

The plastic bands indicate how malnourished a child is. If a limb is less than a pitiful 110mm (4.3in) in circumference, a red bracelet is stapled around it. The child is classed as severe and given a five-day intensive feeding course. The mother receives an emergency package of basic food items.

If the circumference is between 110mm and 124 mm, the child qualifies for a yellow bracelet and the mother is given 25kg (55lb) of fortified flour and 5 litres (8.8pt) of cooking oil — a huge amount in what is officially classed as the second-poorest country in the world — which she can then use to feed all her family.

“After they are given food, the band is switched to blue, which means they can come back in a month’s time and get more,” said an aid worker at a food distribution centre in the village of Dan Malam, 32km (20 miles) outside the southern town of Maradi, one of the worst-affected areas. “They can come back three times.”

In three districts around Maradi, MSF found recently that about 7,000 of 26,000 children aged less than 5 were malnourished and at risk — just over one in four. Children who do not qualify for the yellow bracelets are often still malnourished, certainly by Western standards but will not qualify for emergency aid until their limbs wither further.

Sometimes a desperate mother tries to slip the bracelet off one child to put it on another, but that is almost impossible. The international aid business has become professional: the plastic barely stretches and is fixed firmly.

“Yes, they are still weak, but we have our capacity. We cannot give food to everyone. We have to target the most needy,” the aid worker explained.

In the meantime, those “normal” children must hope food comes into the family via one of their brothers or sisters, or another food relief organisation arrives in the area that employs different criteria for aid distribution.

So far, there is little sign of that. The UN World Food Programme, which distributes food simply to “people in need”, has had a slow response to two emergency appeals and its Niger operation is underfunded by £4 million.

The UN says that a total of 3.6 million people, 800,000 of them children, now face famine throughout the country.

Consequently, the children around Maradi are the lucky ones. In other areas no one really knows the full extent of the crisis. One thing, though, is known: everyone knew the crisis was coming and everyone ignored it.

Along with Mali and Mauritania, the country was hit last year by the worst locust invasion for 40 years. The rains, which have not been adequate for years in countries bordering the Sahara, then failed totally. When they came this year, they brought flooding and water-borne diseases, mainly acute diarrhoea.

All this was happening while Britain and the rest of the world debated poverty in Africa before the G8 summit of the world’s wealthiest nations. Worldwide, thousands of demonstrators wearing white Make Poverty History bracelets marched in favour of debt relief, a doubling of aid and better trade for Africa. “The difference in the use of plastic bracelets here and there encapsulates the huge gulf which now exists between these two worlds,” said an aid worker as she placed a red band around the fragile ankle of a four-year-old girl.

“Make Poverty History is a sick joke here.”

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