Thousands of children could soon starve to death in Niger unless rich countries send emergency food aid to tackle a crisis worsened by decades of outside neglect, a medical charity said on Tuesday. As Britain prepares to put African poverty top of the agenda at a summit for the Group of Eight industrialised nations next week, parents in Niger are burying infants who died because they are too poor to feed them. "Children are dying from hunger today," said Johanne Sekkenes, head of mission for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Niger, a West African state on the Sahara's southern fringe. "The problem is that nobody cares," she told Reuters. "The big donors accept this unacceptable situation in Niger." Ranked as the world's second poorest state according to U.N. statistics, Niger is a vast, mainly desert country where the majority of the 12 million inhabitants survive on what they can grow or herd with the little rain that falls. Even in good years, more than a million people routinely suffer food shortages, but drought has pushed that number to about 3.6 million in 2005, according to aid workers. --More 2312 Local Time 2012 GMT
