World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

The World Food Program (WFP ) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) enabling to take part in auctions to purchase local products. ECX Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Eleni Gebremedhin and WFP Country Director Mohammed Diab signed the MoU.

"We will be self-sufficient," said Gebremichael Giday, chairman of Abreha we Atsebeha, a village high in the arid uplands of northern Ethiopia, about 45km from Mekele, capital of the Tigray region. (..) "All you had to do was build terraces to prevent rainwater from rushing down the hill-slopes - the soil then acts as a sponge and absorbs the water," said Giday. This is a form of watershed management; Ethiopia loses 1.5 billion tons of topsoil to erosion every year, a major contributor to food insecurity, according to World Food Programme (WFP).

The World Food Program (WFP) and German Development Bank (KfW) yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding at German House to raise funds for climate change initiatives while at the same time promoting fuel-efficient stoves in Ethiopia, reports the Ethiopian Reporter. The agreement also promotes cooperation in the field of the clean development mechanism within the framework of Kyoto.

Ethiopia said on Wednesday it expects another 25,000 refugees fleeing fighting in Somalia to cross its border by the end of the year and appealed for $13 million dollars to feed its refugee population. U.N. food agency, WFP, which provides all food aid to refugees in Ethiopia, warned that without the extra funding it would have to reduce food rations by June this year.

Allan Jury of the World Food Program said there are some challenges that must be met if Ethiopia wants to feed the 4.7 million who suffer from hunger and malnutrition in specific locations in Ethiopia. The major problems, he said, have been the limited capacity of the port of Djibouti to handle imported relief, distribution in the Somali region and transport constraints in many parts of the country, government monitoring of needy populations and government accountability.

The European Union (EU) on Monday announced a 23 million Euro food assistance to Ethiopia under its Humanitarian Aid Office.(..)the money is to be channelled through the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to support food assistance for 2.3 million vulnerable people in the country.

Ethiopia's government has tightened media control, stifled opposition and civil society in recent years, and ramped up restrictions ahead of May elections, a rights group said Wednesday. (..) Access to fertiliser, food assistance, health care and schools are conditional on membership of the ruling party, said the report entitled "One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure: Violations of Freedom of Expression and Association in Ethiopia."

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) and the government of France signed an agreement on March 15, 2010 for a contribution of more than one million euro to WFP’s targeted supplementary feeding (TSF) program in Ethiopia.

There are some things that are just too sensitive and difficult to inquire about, and the idea that considerable sums that ordinary people around the world – but especially here in the UK – raised to aid and help their starving fellow humans in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s is one of them. (..) humanitarian operations in the midst of large-scale civil wars where territory is held by rival powers are almost always politicised and misused. (..) in my own country, Somalia, where al-Qaida-affiliated groups have dictated how the World Food Programme delivers emergency food.

The following is the fifth in a series of reports from the Ethiopian village of Koraro, an important testing ground for the Millennium Village Project, an experiment in global development strategy spearheaded by economist Jeffrey Sachs. (..) Jeffrey Sachs and the MVP team are unwilling to let the initiative sputter, and they are in talks with the World Food Program (WFP) – a traditional benefactor of Koraro and the surrounding areas – to make up the difference.