This latest wave of irregular migration, which, at last count, has brought 254 sub-Saharan migrants to the safety of Maltese shores over the last nine days alone, is no quirk or flash in the pan, and the indications are that the proportions of the phenomenon this year may very well revisit the levels of years past.

According to United Nations estimates, 16 million people across the Sahel region of Africa - wedged between the Sahara to the north and the savannah to the south - are facing malnutrition, famine and the very real prospect of starvation.

Senegal, Gambia, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad as well as the northern tips of Nigeria and Cameroon are currently suffering serious food insecurity and matters are expected to worsen as the drought afflicting the region continues to take its brutal toll.

Compounding matters is the recent coup d’état in Mali, where continued fighting in the north of the country has created a refugee crisis that has seen at least 160,000 Malians fleeing into drought-struck areas of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania, whose people are already finding food shortages very difficult to cope with.

The food crisis afflicting the Sahel, the UN warns, is one of the most complex and widest reaching to hit the Sahel of West Africa in living memory. The 2005 and 2010 food crises there had struck mainly Niger and Chad, whereas today’s drought has hit in no less than eight countries stretching from Mauritania to Chad.

Libyan Foreign Minister Bin Ashour Khayal, at a meeting with his Italian counterpart Giulio Terzi on Saturday, warned that Libya was being pressed hard on its southern border and that a significant number of refugees may try to steal north through Libya to Europe.

While calling for greater cooperation from the European Union and Italy, he said that “major changes” to the south of Libya, in the Sahel, and in Mali in particular, were a cause for concern and that indications were that the situation could get far worse, with refugees already piling up in the Libya-Egypt border.

The UN World Food Program, which has been sounding the alarm bell about the Sahel since back in October, this week warned that time was running out to prevent a fully fledged humanitarian crisis in the Sahel, and that a donor funding shortfall of hundreds of millions of euros could soon affect emergency aid programs. Millions of children and pregnant women are now at risk of malnutrition, and they will begin perishing if the situation worsens much further, which it is forecast to do.

Some of these people will head further north, until they reach Libya, and from there the most courageous will pay high prices for places on boats in desperate bids to reach the safety of Europe.

Those lucky enough to make to make it to terra firma on the other side of a sea, which, according to conservative estimates, last year claimed the lives of at least 1,500 in similar circumstances are very few indeed.

But matters are not that swell in Libya either, and it is hoped that the new government, once installed, will sign on to the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees. But in the meantime, migrants reaching Malta in these last nine days have reported that some Libyan militias are disobeying orders from the authorities and are shooting at sub-Saharan nationals, robbing them, breaking into their homes and beating them in the streets.

As the Libyan foreign minister urged on Saturday in Rome, a new migration partnership between Libya and the EU is needed and is long overdue. Such a plan should be constructed without further delay given the mounting situation in the Sahel and the fact that summer, and along with it the height of the irregular migration season, is now well and truly around the corner.

But any such agreement, unlike that signed between Italy and the Gaddafi regime, absolutely must, as a bare minimum, require Libya to sign on to the Geneva Convention, to allow for a fully functioning UNHCR presence there, and also provide for a functioning frontline UNHCR asylum application office in Libya.