Food Crisis in Sahel

 “The Food Crisis in Sahel” is an article made by “Oxfam International”. Oxfam is an international confederation of 17 organizations working together with partners and local communities in more than 90 countries, with the sole purpose of ending hunger and poverty. The main aim for this organisation is to persuade people to join it and contribute to help these people in need. Where it is very noticeable “Oxfam is targeting to reach one million people across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and  Senegal with humanitarian aid”. The article simply starts off with the logistics aspect of the cause, by giving the audience factual numbers of what’s happening in terms of the food crisis and the aftermath (to capture the audience’s attention). And this idea of using logos to attract people’s attention and thus turning into pathos as well (because it would affect people’s emotions to see the ones more needy suffering), is shown throughout the entire  article.

As said earlier this article is to persuade people to join the cause of helping the people in need in Sahel. However it’s more than that as well, it is also to inform and educate people about the problems there. More than that the clear target audience is anybody who is interested and willing to help the ones in need and the ones that are less fortunate. By (as said before) their use of continuous data of numbers in their writing, to affect people’s emotions (turning logos into pathos). This article also outlines what Oxfam is doing to try and stop this crisis, and what they as an organisation and community intend to do as well. Furthermore the author tries to convey the message that these people in Sahel need help, and it is in Oxfam’s interest to do so. Thus I believe the way that the author tried targeting their audience is by making the readers feel sad and bad about the people in Sahel, so that they can get more people to join the cause and jump on the bandwagon. To do this the author uses mainly logos to attract the people’s attention. Such as where it states: “Recent evaluations suggest 12 million people across West and Central Africa are facing a food crisis”. Or when it claims that: “Recent reports said over 5.4 million people in (35% of the population in Niger, some 1.7 million people in Mali, 1.67 million in Burkina Faso and 700,000 people (over one-quarter of the population) in Mauritania are estimated to be vulnerable to food insecurity.” This makes the reader’s think and realize how good they have it compared to others, hence, making them feel bad about these people and hopefully join the organisation.   

The tone of this article is very eye catching and serious, considering that just by looking at the title there’s already a situations “Food Crises in Sahel”. In addition their use of vocabulary, how they do not sugar coat it they go straight to the point which is: There is a food crisis in Sahel and people are going to die if we do not help them. They are able to say these things and really catch the audience’s attention through the use of statistics and numbers of causalities and people in need of food etc. For example: “In Chad 13 out of 22 regions could be affected by this food crisis: some 2.4 million don’t have always enough to eat. There are key words in there that also make set the tone of seriousness such as: ‘serious’, ‘crisis’, ‘causing serious problems’ etc. This makes people really feel for the people in Sahel and in Africa in general, thus altering the mood to a sad one (as said before).

In this article although it is discussing a serious matter it uses the informal approach of using pronouns. But why? As said before since Oxfam is trying to persuade people to join their organisation (as this is their clear goal), I assume that they use pronouns to try to already convince the reader that they are part of this action taking society, by including them. They do this by using words such as: ‘We’re’, or ‘we’ etc. The whole article engages the reader because it portrays a problem and includes the reader to find a way to solve it. As well as that the main sentence structure is for the whole article is declarative, because it declares that ‘there is a food crisis in Sahel’, it declares the number of people who are suffering from this crisis etc.

In conclusion this article was created to get people more aware of the situation happening in Sahel and what Oxfam is trying to do to help. It is also there to inform and educate the people that do not know what’s happening in Sahel, thus meaning to raise awareness to this serious cause. This has been explained in the text, by explaining how they use the vocabulary, who their target audience is, how they use statistics to attract people’s attention and what tone and mood they try to give off with the article itself.