MARADI (Niger): With her family’s stocks of millet long gone, Rachida Abdou tied her shrunken baby girl to her back and grabbed the emaciated hand of her seven-year-old son. Together, they set out in search of food, or for somebody who might help.

On the fifth day of their journey, they stumbled into Maradi, a trading centre. There, Abdou recounted, they saw something that they hadn’t encountered in a very long time: food. There were sacks of rice, bags of peanuts and baskets of millet in the bustling markets. There was enough food — here in the epicentre of a major hunger crisis — to feed her family and thousands like it, if only they had the cash.

“What can you do?” said Abdou, a tall woman of about 30 with dark, piercing eyes. She sounded frustrated, and a bit desperate.

“The price of millet is very high.”

As streams of women like Abdou arrive here, with skeletal babies strapped to their backs, they are discovering some unexpected reasons for the hunger crisis in Niger: it is the result not only of food shortages but a host of other problems, including vendor profiteering, a government policy shift toward a free market, and a decline in the traditional culture of generosity that once helped communities in Niger survive cyclical periods of scarcity.

In a country adopting free market policies, the suffering caused by a poor harvest has been dramatically compounded by a surge in food prices and, many people here suspect, profiteering by a burgeoning community of traders, who in recent years have been freed from government price controls and other mechanisms that once balanced market forces.

At the same time, Nigeriens said, the tradition of sharing in their society is giving way to sharper, more selfish attitudes as Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries, reaches for a more materialistic, Westernized future. That is especially true here, along the southern border with Nigeria, where an aggressive entrepreneurial culture has created the economic powerhouse of West Africa.

“There are people who are making profit out of this whole situation,” said Abdoulkader Mamane Idi, a local radio journalist. “The link of brotherhood and solidarity has been broken.”

A UN report found that prices in markets in Niger have shot up sharply because of profiteering, said James Morris, executive director of the UN World Food Programme, speaking from San Francisco. Some traders, he said, have raised prices in anticipation of the arrival of aid groups, which often buy food locally to save on transport costs.

“There is nothing like generosity now,” said Malan Hassane, the imam of a neighbourhood mosque. “Selfishness is gaining ground.” —Dawn/The Washington Post News Service