Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

As we know, military intervention rarely comes without a price. Too often, we have seen the so-called war on terror become the reason for intervention and this is, seemingly, part of the French argument for moving into Mali. I do not know whether the Minister has noticed, but in the past few weeks international agencies have been warning that northern Mali is about to descend to an emergency level of food insecurity and that if conditions do not improve, we are looking at a disastrous situation. Already, more than 250,000 people have been displaced and the number of refugees is growing. The agencies have been at pains to point out that one in every five households now faces food shortages, categorised as severe in northern Mali and as extreme in the Kidal region.

All of this is happening against a backdrop of a chronic nutritional crisis that kills children every day, the majority of them in the south of the country, where 90% of Malians live. The UNICEF Mali representative, Hector Calderon, has estimated that 210,000 will suffer from life-threatening malnutrition this year and 450,000 will suffer a less severe, but debilitating, form of malnutrition.

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