World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

Young returnees await food distribution from the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) near Aweil in Sudan’s Bahr el Ghazal state. Thousands of Sudanese are moving back south—sometimes after decades of living away from their ancestral homes—ahead of a January 9 referendum vote.

Returnees from north Sudan wait in line for World Food Program (WFP) staff to start distributing food in Aweil in the northern Bahr el Ghazal state in south Sudan December 29, 2010. People from Sudan's oil-producing south are widely expected to vote to split away to form Africa's newest nation in a referendum scheduled to take place on January 9, 2011 that was promised in a 2005 peace deal ending a civil war between north and south.

The UN’s humanitarian wing in the Southern Sudanese capital has been hard at work for the past several months on contingency plans for various scenarios related to the south’s January 9 independence referendum and its aftermath. (..) UN agencies such as the World Food Program are “pre-prepositioning the six core pipelines” (“food, nutrition, non-food items and emergency shelter, emergency medical kits, seeds and tools, and water, sanitation and hygienge supplies”) which would be activated to “mitigate the impact of conflict by providing humanitarian assistance and protection to victims.”

With the referendum on southern independence just 19 days away, humanitarian organizations in Sudan are preparing for the possible results by moving three months of emergency supplies into areas where they think conflict could occur. The World Food Program's warehouse in Southern Sudan's capital, Juba, is a busy place. A truck loaded with 28 metric tons of sorghum has arrived from the Kenyan port of Mombasa. Workers move the bags into another truck headed to the neighboring Western Equatoria state.

With the referendum on southern independence just 19 days away, humanitarian organizations in Sudan are preparing for the possible results by moving three months of emergency supplies into areas where they think conflict could occur. The World Food Program's warehouse in Southern Sudan's capital, Juba, is a busy place. A truck loaded with 28 metric tons of sorghum has arrived from the Kenyan port of Mombasa. Workers move the bags into another truck headed to the neighboring Western Equatoria state.

The deputy representative of United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Southern Sudan, Mireille Girard, Sudan told Sudan Tribune on Wednesday that over 55,000 Southern Sudanese have returned to the south ahead of the region’s independence referendum in January. (..) On arrival other agencies like World Food Programme (WFP) and the southern government will provide the returnees with hummanitarian assistance including three months of rations.

Three Latvian aid air crew kidnapped in Darfur a month ago have been freed, the World Food Programme (WFP) says. The circumstances of their release are still unknown, a WFP spokeswoman in Sudan said. She added that no ransom had been paid for the three men, who were helicopter crewmen contracted to the WFP.

In October I wrote about school feeding to fight child hunger in Southern Sudan. Featured in the piece was a school meal initiative being run by Catholic Relief Services. This program, at last report, is to run out of funding at the end of December. (..) A school feeding program for 16,889 primary school children in Southern Sudan will run out of funding at the end of December. This is a program run by Catholic Relief Services in partnership with the World Food Programme.

Sudanese are returning from the north of the country to their homeland in the south or the border region of Abyei in growing numbers in the run-up to key referendums on 9 January, but many are struggling to adapt to an impoverished, war-ravaged environment. (..) “The returnee process is being organized by the Abyei area administration and the Southern Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (SSRRC),” Margherita Coco, head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) sub-office in Abyei, told IRIN. “The humanitarian community decided that once they arrive, a certain level of support would be offered. WFP provides a three-month reintegration ration, given monthly.”

South Sudan is preparing to hold a referendum on January 9 that could see the region split from Sudan's Arab-dominated government in Khartoum. (..) U.N. aid agencies and non-governmental organizations are quietly mobilizing to respond to emergencies. The U.N.'s World Food Program began operations here in 2008, after northern forces burned down half of Abyei and displaced more than 50,000 people.