World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

WFP is mobilising all available resources to bring urgently needed food assistance to thousands of people affected by the devastating earthquake which hit the Caribbean island of Haiti on Tuesday, causing massive death and destruction.

Actor Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith are helping WFP to raise funds to feed hungry children in Haiti by auctioning a special artwork signed by music artists who performed at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo last month.

Natasha Belony, like three-quarters of Haitians, lives on less than US $2 a day and feeding her children is a daily struggle. Her 15-month old son is malnourished but he has just started receiving WFP nutritional support and so he has a good chance of recovering.

Two thirds of the way through the 2009 hurricane season, Haiti has yet to be hit by a major storm – a phenomenon for which international aid agencies, government officials and the people of this Caribbean nation are grateful. But in case the luck should not hold, WFP is ready.

For more than 40 years, WFP has been helping people whose lives depend on the vagaries of the weather. For these people, nature is both a friend and a foe. If it brings just enough rain, then crops will thrive and families will be fed. Too much rain - or too little - and disaster strikes.

As the first hurricane of 2009 grinds its way across the western Atlantic, the World Food Programme in Haiti is completing disaster-preparedness measures for this year’s hurricane season, in an island nation hit by four serious storms last year

A fleet of trucks, donated by the Norwegian Red Cross to WFP Haiti, delivered food and humanitarian supplies to Haitians battered by hurricanes in 2008 – and are poised to come to the rescue again during this hurricane season.

With WFP support, a system of stone-lined ditches is being built on the hills overlooking Gonaives in a bid to prevent a repeat of last year when mudslides buried the north Haitian city, contributing to a severe hunger crisis.

An increase in child malnutrition cases at a hospital in Cite Soleil hospital highlights the effects the economic crisis is having among Haiti’s poor, especially those who depend on money sent by relatives working overseas.

Angelica Richard, who one day would like to be a doctor, says she had no breakfast before coming to school and won’t get anything when she goes home tonight. “This is my only meal of the day. Sometimes I feel weak in the morning and can’t wait till lunchtime.”