World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

The political, financial and intellectual power present at Davos provides the potential for so much good to be accomplished. (..) The key lesson from DSM's partnership with the World Food Programme is that when the private sector is really engaged with IGOs on both the product and strategic levels, then real progress can be made. This can be seen in Haiti where DSM has been working very closely with the WFP to provide immediate emergency support and to develop a longer-term strategy for rebuilding the country's nutrition base.

As humanitarian efforts in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, begin to hum along and Washington's attention shifts from relief to recovery, there is a growing appetite in some quarters of Capitol Hill for an ambitious nation-building project. (..) USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah (..) warned that the humanitarian crisis has not passed. On Monday, he visited USAID's disaster response center with Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, to fire up the troops. "It's important,” he said, "that people don't take their eye off the ball."

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that while the relief effort in Haiti is beginning to gain its footing, providing food for more than 2 million people a day represents the most complex task it has ever faced. Relief agencies have tried to buy goods locally and regionally, but such efforts have been hampered because local markets affected by the earthquake have been slow to re-open, and Haiti's subsistence farms have been unable to ramp up production. This has forced the WFP to use nearly all of its stores of high-energy biscuits and nutrient-rich meals which do not require water.

Christina Aguilera and Muhammad Ali have joined forces with the Yum! Brands Foundation to help raise much needed money for the United Nations World Food Programme’s (WFP) Haiti relief efforts.

International aid officials said that the ongoing relief effort in Haiti is moving ahead but faces significant challenges. “This is the most massive urban calamity we have faced in our history and perhaps the most complex,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme.

Amid the opulence of Davos, it was difficult for Josette Sheeran to talk about a country in such desperate need of cash and tents just to survive. In a town where it is hard go a day without an invitation to a grand meal during the World Economic Forum, the executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP) told how it is "every step a nightmare" in Haiti where bodies are still being collected more than two weeks after the devastating earthquake. "It is the most complicated catastrophe we have ever been confronted" with, she told a special meeting on the quake held for the 2,500 executives, politicians and academics at the glitzy Davos forum.

Whether locked up in warehouses or stolen by thugs from people's hands, food from the world's aid agencies still isn't getting to enough hungry Haitians, leaving the strongest and fittest with the most. (..) On food aid, the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), which says it has reached 450,000 people, urgently appealed to governments for more cash for Haiti supplies -- $800 million to feed 2 million people through December, more than quadruple the $196 million already pledged.

Haiti's main airport looks like a war zone, but the troops encamped beside the runway in Port-au-Prince are there to save lives, not to take them. (..) The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) began distributing high-energy biscuits to hungry Haitians within the first 24 hours after the earthquake and has not let up. The makeshift WFP compound in Port-au-Prince is littered with pup tents -- the closest thing to housing that most aid workers have had since the earthquake.

While teams from around the globe came in to rescue those buried in the rubble, so, too, did surgeons and paramedics, performing procedures in open fields and makeshift clinics under tents. (..) The UN and other groups are also increasing food distribution by the day. The United Nations World Food Program provided 2 million meals this past Friday, representing about two-thirds of all of those hurt or displaced by the earthquake, up from 1.2 million the day before.

The UN World Food Program (WFP) has prioritized women in Haiti food aid distribution to ensure that the most vulnerable get access to aid, the WFP executive director told a news conference on Tuesday. (..) "It is our methodology to distribute only to women to ensure that food gets to women and children in Haiti," she said. "Every time we have not had adequate security escorts, we have had riots at food sites."