€30 million of this would be additional funding for the Sahel and €10 million for Sudan. This extra €30 million will bring the total humanitarian aid funds allocated by the Commission to fighting malnutrition in the Sahel since the end of 2009 to €98 million.

The additional funds will be used to boost the humanitarian aid operations carried out by European Commission humanitarian aid partners and will help provide food assistance to over 500,000 extra beneficiaries during the next critical months until harvest time in October. Currently, over 10 million people in the Sahel region are at risk of food insecurity. Of these over 7 million are in Niger and 3 million of these are considered to be severely food insecure and in need of urgent food assistance.

Commissioner Georgieva said: "During my visit to Niger in early June I saw for myself the scale of the food crisis affecting the Sahel region and the ensuing large numbers of severely malnourished children brought for treatment to Commission funded nutrition centres. Thanks to the timely and significant food assistance funded by the European Commission and the good work of our partners over the past months many lives have been saved.

“However climatic, economic and nutritional conditions have further worsened for millions of people living in the "drought belt" of Sahel but also in Sudan, where people already suffer from a conflict situation. We need to do more and we must act quickly if we want to avoid adults and children dying from starvation. The next few months until the next harvest will be a critical time. With the additional funding that we have requested we will be able to help hundreds of thousands more people more to survive through this hungry period".

The risk of a looming food crisis in the Sahel was identified by humanitarian aid experts from the European Commission as early as September 2009. The Commission reacted swiftly to the first reports of erratic rains which resulted in poor harvests and allocated €10 million in December 2009. Since then, the European Commission has been working closely with its non-governmental, Red Cross and United Nations partners to raise awareness of the scale of the crisis and of the need to work pro-actively to ensure that funds and food were available in time to help.

Subsequent allocations of humanitarian aid in response to the growing food crisis included €20 million in January 2010 to fund the 2010 Sahel Global Plan to fight malnutrition of children in the Sahel and a €24 million food crisis response decision in June 2010. €14 million was also allocated in 2010 in Chad for food assistance for the victims of drought.