Aid agency Oxfam warns that the food crisis gripping the Sahel region of Africa is reaching disastrous levels and is calling on governments and the international community to act now.

"The eyes of the world have trouble seeing this crisis," the group's deputy regional director Raphael Sindaye said, "nonetheless, it is threatening 10 million people in north-central Africa."

"The already extremely alarming situation is clearly going to become disastrous," Gilles Marion, Oxfam's director in Mali, added. Families had already been reduced to just one meal a day, he said.

With crops failing across the region, women had been reduced to breaking up anthills or scavenging for wild plants in the search for food, they said.

The crisis stretched across the region, they said, taking in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria. Scant and irregular rainfall since last year set off the crisis. "When the pastures did not grow back from December-January, the animals suffered," in northern Mali, said Marion.

Source: AFP/Oxfam