World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

America is being tested this year in ways we could not have imagined a year ago. Now I bring you another challenge: to continue our national tradition of aiding the world's poor by helping the people of eastern Congo. A few weeks ago, I visited the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to see how the United Nations World Food Programme was faring in its attempt to feed more than a million people. (...) I hope that my country chooses to save lives in the Congo by continuing to support the World Food Programme as it strives to provide more aid to the orphans, the sick, and those torn from their homes.

Thousands of Congolese civilians have fled across the border to South Sudan to escape rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday. About 2,000 left northeastern Congo for the Sudanese village of Lasu last week alone, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said. Thousands more Congolese are already living in South Sudan, having fled their villages for fear of attacks by the rebels Uganda-based rebel group, Ron Redmond told reporters in Geneva. The population in South Sudan is unable to support all the refugees, so the World Food Program plans to deliver emergency rations to the area, Redmond said.

Congolese soldiers have been accused of barring UN troops and aid staff from an area where an operation with Rwandan troops is ongoing on a Hutu militia. A UN spokesman in the Democratic Republic of Congo told the BBC it was "deplorable", when so many displaced people were in desperate need of help.

Humanitarian agencies are still trying to gather information from parts of northeastern DRC that were recently attacked by Ugandan rebels. Attacks by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) killed hundreds of people and caused thousands of others to flee into the bush. UN agencies and others are trying to determine the exact number of people who need emergency assistance and the best way of getting it to them. Jim Farrell, spokesman for the World Food Program, spoke from Goma, in the eastern DRC, to VOA English to Africa Service reporter Joe De Capua about the status of relief operations.

THE World Food Programme (WFP) has began buying food directly from small-holding farmers in Uganda to boost opportunities for poverty eradication. The UN food agency said in a statement yesterday that it bought $53m worth of food locally last year for recipients in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Eastern DR Congo. The statement said the agency plans to increase the purchases to more than $100m annually in three years. The country director, Stanlake Samkange, said WFP recently started buying food through the warehouse receipt system to increase direct assistance to small-scale farmers and support the Government poverty eradication efforts. “Buying food directly from small-scale farmers, especially at high prices, helps further by improving the quality of life for the poorest people,” Samkange said in the statement.

The UN World Food Program (WFP) has delivered emergency supplies for more than 18,000 displaced people in the strife-torn eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who are victims of violence at the hands of the notorious Ugandan rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).