World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) hopes to offer school feeding to help Benin recover from severe flooding and poverty. Lack of funding has stopped the program from opening this academic year.

The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) will extend its support to another 360,000 people in Benin whose lives have been disrupted by the West African country's worst floods in living memory, a spokesman said. At present WFP is feeding 50,000 people who have been driven from their homes by the deluge.

The United Nations World Food Program has begun distributing food to 50,000 of the 680,000 people who have been hit by heavy floods in Benin. (..) "Basically this is the first time this country has been hit by flooding of this magnitude and aid donors are coming very slowly and there is a fear that if intervention is not done quickly, the situation might deteriorate," said Ouedraogo [World Food Program's country director in Benin].

The World Food Programme (WFP) is seeking to deliver emergency food aid to tens of thousands of victims of the heaviest floods to hit the African country of Benin in 100 years, it said Tuesday. The floods have affected more than 680,000 people in more than three-quarters of Benin's municipalities.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Benin have been affected by the country's worst flooding in nearly half a century, aid agencies have warned. (..) The agency said the UK's Department for International Development, the UN, World Food Programme, Plan International and Benin Red Cross were among those responding, but the crisis had barely registered around the world.

During 2008, I interviewed Jacques Roy of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Benin. At that time, WFP's top priority for fighting hunger and poverty in the country was school feeding, and with good reason. Last week at a conference with members of the media, Josette Sheeran, the WFP director, said that "We need more success stories" in the fight against hunger. If the support is there at this critical juncture, Benin may very well be on its way to completing its own success story.