MOPTI, Mali (AlertNet) -- The Peul herders arrived two months early in Mopti town this year.

Normally, the Peuls move to Mopti when it gets too hot in the north, in late March. But pastures in northern Mali are exhausted from last year's poor rains and locust invasion, so the Peuls moved to this hub on the Niger River, dotting its outskirts with their distinctive circular straw huts.

Abnormal movements of people and herds are taking place across Mali, driven by hunger of humans and animals.

The locals in Mopti are only marginally better off than the nomads. This year the river is exceptionally low and fishing is poor.

"We shouldn't be catching young fish, but what else can we do?" said Sekou Konte, the chief of Kakolagada, a fishing village near Mopti, pointing to the heap of tiny dried fish that his wife was piling in a basket.

Across Mali, one million people risk hunger, the government said in early March.

Particular hardship is being felt across Mali's Sahelian belt, which stretches, along the border with Mauritania, the central Mopti region and north into Tombouctou and Gao.

The country has posted a deficit of 340,000 tons of cereals and requested 50,000 tons of food aid.

The World Food Programme (WFP) is providing 12,000 tons of food as food-for-work to build small dams, canals, fishponds and wells.

"The food will restore people’s productive capacity," Pablo Recalde, WFP country director, told AlertNet.

The natural disaster is compounded by civil war in neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire, where up to a million Malians found casual work in the cocoa plantations. Their remittances have dried up and a key market for Mali's cattle has closed.

COPING WITH HUNGER

According to Oxfam, the U.K.-based development and relief organisation, the worst hit is the region of Gao in the northeast, where one-third of adults have left to find food and child malnutrition is rising.

People in Gao are eating wild cram-cram grass of little nutritional value. A day's search yields only a handful, for the silky grass has turned into dry straw.

At the weekly cattle markets, herders offer young calves and females, a classic sign of distress sales and a famine coping mechanism.

Harsh in any year, the triangle between Gao, Bourem and Menake towns is a semi-arid sandy plain with a bit of thorny scrub, peopled by nomadic herders.

Just under half a million people live in mud houses and tents in this area. In the dry season, the Harmattan wind from the Sahara blows, sand whirls across the endless plain and temperatures rise over 45 degrees Celsius.

Last year's locusts destroyed 40 percent of the pastures around Menake town. The swarms ate the local staples, sorghum and wild fonio, a local cereal, and the acacia leaves that feed the herds. Poor rains dried out the ponds.

Hundreds of carcasses of goats and donkeys litter the outskirts of Chinkaye village, north of Bourem. If the camels die, so does the nomadic lifestyle.

"We will move to the cities in Algeria," said a villager in Amagad La. "There we will be seen. Here, nobody can see how bad things are."

Oxfam estimates that 100,000 people will need food aid in Gao until the next harvest in October. The charity is distributing food to 2,150 most vulnerable families, some 16,000 people.

"If nothing is done, the hot season from March to July will be dangerous and dramatic for our people," said Baba Ould Cheick, the mayor of Tarkint commune, north of Bourem.

PRECIOUS RESOURCES

Mali isn’t the only country that’s suffering. Pastoralists from neigbouring Niger and Burkina Faso are crossing the border looking for grazing for their camels, cattle, sheep and goats. Such movements are seen only in the worst years of drought, says Oxfam.

"Lots of foreigners arrive with their camels," said villager Achine Ag Abaibad.

The newcomers quickly deplete water and pastures, heightening the risk of conflict over local natural resources.

Back in Kakoladaga, Peul herders have built huts next to the village’s gray banco, or adobe, houses. Their Zebu cattle -- thought to be the world’s oldest domesticated cattle -- graze along the shrunken Niger River. Both locals and newcomers find it hard to fill their bellies every day.

Food prices have doubled in the last months, Chief Konte told Alertnet.

The chief said the community was asleep when the locusts arrived early one morning last July. When people went to the fields in the morning, the swarm had eaten everything that was green -- stems, stalks, leaves and blades. The locusts devastated a total of 940,000 hectares, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Last week, a swarm of tree locusts passed by Kakoladaga. The villagers trembled and got their sticks ready to bat them -- a traditional if ineffective method -- but the swarm moved on south without stopping.

"Allah be praised," said the chief.