World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

The provision of school lunches to 215,000 children in 1,200 primary schools in southern Madagascar could be suspended by the end of January 2013 if the World Food Programme (WFP) fails to make up a funding shortfall of US$4.84 million. “Normally, we send out enough food to the schools for three months, but since the stock is so low, we are planning to send out only for a month,” said Enrique Alvarez, head of the WFP sub-office in Ambovombe, on Madagascar's southern coast. (..) Alvarez added that, in the past, when WFP had shortages, parents brought food to the schools themselves, but the severity of this year's lean season makes that impossible.

About half of Madagascar's children under the age of five are stunted - the irreversible effect of undernourishment during the first 1,000 days of life. Children who suffer from stunting are at greater risk of illness, impaired cognitive development and death.

When officials asked everybody in the commune (sub-district) of Talata in Madagascar's central Amoron'i Mania region to register their land in 2007, it was to be the beginning of a national programme of far-reaching and much needed land reforms aimed at recognizing local land rights and decentralizing land management. (..) EFA is now one of three NGOs working on land reform in the country. With funding from the National Land Programme, which continues to function at a slow pace and with minimal resources, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), it gives technical assistance to 39 local land offices in the Northern Atsinanana region

The result of under-nourished babies is children and adults who never grow to their full potential. (..) The Madagascar Demographic Health Survey 2008-09 found that stunting affects half of all Malagasy children under five, the sixth highest rate of stunting in the world, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Poverty is a major factor, particularly more than two years into a political and economic crisis that began with Andry Rajoelina's ousting of President Marc Ravalomanana in 2009 and the withdrawal of all but emergency donor aid to the country.

Up to 200,000 people in southern Madagascar will be involved in a food production initiative by the World Food Program (WFP), a source from this organization in Antananarivo told Xinhua on Thursday.

In parts of Madagascar's drought-prone south people have resorted to eating cattle-feed, as successive years of crop failures and the current lean season give food insecurity a firmer grip on the region. (..) The World Food Programme (WFP) in Madagascar said drought had caused the widespread failure of maize crops in the southern regions of Atsimo Andrefana, Androy and Anosy to fail. The lean season, when the previous harvest has been consumed and the new crops are not yet ready, runs from October to about March.

The United States is giving $3 million in emergency food aid to the World Food Program to try to prevent widespread famine in southern Madagascar. The United Nations agency predicts 720,000 people in three regions could be severely affected in the next few months by a drought and lack of basic resources.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned of an "imminent and severe threat from the increasing number of swarms of Migratory Locusts" in Madagascar, requiring "immediate response assistance to prevent a humanitarian disaster". (..)Up to 52 communes in the region are predicted to be food insecure by the end of 2010, and 10 of these - containing around 100,000 people - are seen as acutely food insecure, according to an evaluation by the World Food Programme in July 2010.

Getting hold of food and reproductive health services are probably the two most difficult things for women in rural southern Madagascar, so it makes sense for UN agencies to combine food aid with maternal and child healthcare. Drought is chronic in the south of the huge Indian Ocean Island, where the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has been providing food aid since 1968 (..). "Southern Madagascar is the most food insecure area of the country," the WFP Health and Nutrition Programme Officer in Madagascar, Flora Bertizzolo, told IRIN. "It is also an area with very poor reproductive health indicators - much worse than national average," she said.

Far from the world's financial centres, isolated from sub-prime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations and collapsing investment banks, Madagascar is going through a financial crisis of its own, and stock prices are plummeting. (..) He has helped build water harvesters with the help of UN World Food Programme (WFP) Food-for-Work projects, in which a community works on projects geared to restoring self-sufficiency in exchange for food aid.