World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

The French ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Pierre Jacquemot, and the representative of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Kinshasa, Abdou Dieng, on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding, worth 1.5 million euros, in a bid to strengthen the UN agency's efforts in providing food to victims of armed conflicts in the country.

Night-time attacks on civilians and rape by armed men remain widespread in a strife-torn region of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where nearly5,400 cases of rape were reported in the first six months of the year (..) The UN World Food Program (WFP) has been providing three-month food rations to the returning IDPs while the UNHCR has supplied non-food items, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) farm tools and other agriculture inputs.

At least 65,000 people who fled clashes in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have begun to return to their villages on a voluntary basis, the UN refugee agency announced Wednesday. (..) The World Food Programme (WFP) is providing the returnees with rations of food for three months and a kit of non-food items to help them resume their farming lives.

The World Food Program says it will start distributing food next week to 40,000 internally displaced people returning to their homes from camps around the city of Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. (..) "The assistance is designed to help them resettle and work their fields during the current planting season," Casella explained.

The UN’s World Food Programme says it has a shortfall of $3bn (£1.8bn) in 2009. WFP and other agencies are hoping raising brand awareness will help in their fundraising for activities such as food distribution in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Picture: Marcus Prior, WFP

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Congolese President Joseph Kabila say they are both committed to improving security in Congo's troubled Kivu regions. (..) The U.N. World Food Program's Stephanie Savariaud says it is all about security. "The biggest challenge is what to decide to do. To go back home? Maybe not, it is too dangerous. To stay here? But they have no field to cultivate food. Safety is the key for people like IDP's for sure," she said.

Mawuwa felt confused and scared when she returned to the eastern Congolese province of South Kivu after spending a decade in refugee camps across Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. (..) "Food was hard to find. I was breast-feeding and I needed to eat a lot to have milk. But there was never enough for me to eat. I was always waiting for food and help from the World Food Programme."

Just a few kilometres before we reached Yokama school, we came across the shells of three tanks, burnt to a crisp, destroyed by rocket fire. A few kilometres later we saw an old railway town, with barely a building left untouched by exploded ordinance and shrapnel. (..) World Food Program (WFP) recently started expanding its school feeding program in Pool, enabling many more schools to offer a lunchtime meal to their students. For most parents, that is enough to make the difference - their child goes to school instead of staying behind to help at home.

The UN World Food Program (WFP) has started air dropping food into Dungu in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) since this weekend to reach more than 130,000 displaced people and their host families cut off by heavy seasonal rains. (..) "This is the only way left to us. We have ferried in as much as we could by plane and truck, but the rainy season has made landing planes almost impossible at times and road conditions extremely difficult. We have to be sure people get the life-saving food they need," said Abdou Dieng, WFP Country Director for DR Congo.

The United Nations humanitarian wing is urging greater protection for civilians in the South Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which has witnessed a surge in sexual violence since the beginning of this year. (..) Meanwhile, the World Food Programme (WFP) has distributed some 2,459 tons of food to 323,472 people in South Kivu during the past two months.