World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

How much would it cost to prevent a famine? We don’t know exactly, but one answer is surely this: Much less than it would cost to save lives after famine hits. (..) “After the 2003 crisis in Ethiopia there was a big shift in the ways the World Food Program, the World Bank and governments started to look at food security,” said Richard Choularton, Senior Policy Officer for Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction at the W.F.P.

Unusually poor rains in the Horn of Africa, compounded by a shortage of reserve food supplies, have forced Ethiopia to reduce the size of emergency rations to needy citizens. (..) The United States and the U.N. World Food Program are among the main partners, or providers of nutritional assistance. But the WFP relief and refugee section chief in Ethiopia, Giammichele De Maio, says it can take months from the time an appeal is made until the food arrives.

Ethiopia started an agricultural agency that plans to help double production in the economy’s biggest industry over the next five years, said Wonderad Mandefro, minister of state for agriculture. (..) About 3 million of Ethiopia’s 80 million people are in need of emergency food assistance, the government said on April 12. Another 7.8 million people receive food or cash under an aid program, World Food Programme spokesman Susannah Nicol said in a phone interview yesterday from Addis Ababa.

A rebel group in Ethiopia's arid Somali region has issued an urgent appeal for humanitarian assistance, accusing the government of blocking aid deliveries. (..)But humanitarian groups reacted sharply to the ONLF allegations. UN World Food Program spokeswoman in Ethiopia, Susannah Nicol, says safeguards are in place to ensure aid reaches the neediest.

East African countries, particularly Kenya and Somalia, should start preparing for food shortages, the U.S.-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network, known as Fewsnet, said. (..) The United Nations World Food Program needs 647 million metric tons of food for 6.2 million Ethiopians at a cost of about $484 million, according to its website. In Kenya, the food agency is seeking $226 million to purchase 255 million metric tons for about 2.1 million people, it said.

Since November, East African countries have registered serious drought conditions that are likely to worsen in coming months. (..) The assistant minister in the Kenyan Ministry of State for Special Programmes, Mahmoud Ali, was also at the event and stressed that the government was providing food assistance to one million Kenyans while the World Food Programme (WFP) was distributing food to another 1.6 million people.

Poor rains, especially in the Somali and Oromiya regions of Ethiopia, have led to food shortages and prompted the government and its international partners to appeal for US$226.5 million in relief aid for almost three million people, a government official said. (..) "The drought is persisting," Felix Gomez, deputy country director for the UN World Food Programme, told IRIN. "We have seen early migration of livestock [which has] begun to pressurize water points and pasture."

Land grabs have grabbed global attention. It's on the agenda at the World Economic Forum this week, and as the trend for large land acquisitions accelerates, it has moved from being primarily a story about Middle Eastern petrodollars pouring into Africa, to a much more widely spread phenomenon affecting many parts of south-east Asia, such as the Phillipines, as well as Latin America. (..) The US environmentalist Lester Brown points out in his new book, World on the Edge, that in 2009 Saudi Arabia received its first shipment of rice produced on land it had acquired in Ethiopia while at the same time the World Food Programme was feeding 5 million Ethiopians.

Growing signs of drought in the Horn of Africa could lead to food shortages in Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia, while rising food prices may put its budget under pressure, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Wednesday. "Certain regions that are prone to drought and weather variation are showing signs of cyclical food shortages," Sheila Sisulu, deputy executive director with the U.N. agency, told Reuters. "The Horn of Africa immediately comes to mind.

New automated weather stations could boost Ethiopia's fledgling agricultural insurance schemes, expanding the use of payouts triggered by abnormally low rainfall and reducing costly visual verification of yield losses. (..) "The stations will allow us to identify climate risks at an early stage and better protect vulnerable, food-insecure people in rural areas through innovative projects such as the weather risk insurance," said Felix Gomez, Ethiopia acting country director for the World Food Programme, which installed the stations.