World Food Program: five things you need to know

Somalis living in nearby camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) queue in Mogadishu to receive meals prepared in the courtyard of a Somali non-governmental organization that is a partner of the World Food Program and serves about 1,000 people daily with rations of flour corn and vegetable soup on August 15, 2011. Image: AFP / Roberto Schmidt

The United Nations World Food Program, which won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, provides food assistance in emergencies, from wars to civil strife, natural disasters and famines.

Here are five facts about the Rome-based organization:

Beginning

Created in 1962 at the request of US President Dwight Eisenhower as an experiment in providing food aid through the UN system, the WFP was only in existence for a few months when an earthquake struck northern Iran.

More than 12,000 people died. WFP sent 1,500 metric tons of wheat, 270 tons of sugar and 27 tons of tea to the survivors.

Others soon needed his help: a typhoon made landfall in Thailand; war refugees needed to feed in Algeria.

In 1963 the first WFP school meals project was born. In 1965, the agency became a UN program in its own right.

By 2019, it would help 97 million people in 88 countries. WFP says that on any given day it has 5,600 trucks, 30 ships and nearly 100 planes moving. Distributes more than 15 billion food rations a year.

Mission

WFP focuses on emergency assistance, as well as rehabilitation and development assistance. Two-thirds of their work is done in conflict-affected countries, where people are three times more likely to be undernourished than elsewhere.

It works closely with the other two Rome-based UN agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which helps countries develop policies and change legislation to support sustainable agriculture. , and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which finances projects. in poor rural areas.

WFP is fully funded by voluntary donations, the majority of which come from governments. It raised $ 8 billion in 2019, which it says was used to provide 4.2 million metric tons of food and $ 2.1 billion in cash and coupons.

It has more than 17,000 employees, 90 percent of whom are in the countries where the agency provides assistance.

Where in the world?

There are few places where WFP has not provided assistance. In the drought-ravaged western Sahel in the 1970s, he used “everything in his power, from the car to the camel, from the road to the river, to help those in need.”

It delivered 2 million tons of food during the 1984 famine in Ethiopia. It was present in Sudan, Rwanda and Kosovo, then in Asia after the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which is suffering from the world’s second-largest hunger crisis, it helped 6.9 million people in 2019, in addition to helping fight a deadly outbreak of the Ebola virus.

It helps 4.5 million people in war-torn Syria and 300,000 acutely malnourished children in conflict-ravaged Nigeria.

But WFP’s largest emergency response has been in Yemen, where it tries to feed 13 million people each month.

Hunger today and coronavirus

More than 821 million people in the world are chronically hungry, while another 135 million face severe hunger or starvation, and an additional 130 million could join them by the end of 2020 due to the coronavirus, the agency warns.

The number of severely food insecure people in the world had already risen by nearly 70 percent in the past four years, and the economic consequences of the virus pandemic are expected to trigger “a hunger pandemic,” the WFP said.

“We urgently need more support from donors, who of course are already struggling from the impact of the pandemic in their own countries.”

Coronavirus

WFP’s logistics services used a network of hubs, passenger and cargo air links, and medical evacuation services to allow a constant flow of cargo and workers to the front line of the pandemic.

The consequences of the coronavirus are being felt most strongly in Latin America, which has seen a nearly three-fold increase in the number of people requiring food assistance, as well as in West, Central and Southern Africa.

“Before the coronavirus became a problem, it was saying that 2020 would face the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II,” WFP Executive Director David Beasley told the UN security council this year.

“With Covid-19, we are not only facing a global health pandemic, but also a global humanitarian catastrophe.” IB

RELATED STORIES:

World Food Program wins Nobel Peace Prize

Genetic ‘scissors’ scientists win Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Read next

Don’t miss out on the latest news and information.