World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

DAKAR – The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is launching a distribution of cash vouchers in the town of Bignona, in the Ziguinchor region, tomorrow, for people hit by poor harvests and high food prices.

The Government is Brazil is providing $2 375 000 for a new local food purchase programme to be set up by FAO and the World Food Programme (WFP) to benefit farmers and vulnerable populations in five African countries – Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger and Senegal.

The World Food Programme and the United States Agency for International Development join together with Oxfam America and Swiss Re in a public private partnership to help the rural poor to protect their crops and livelihoods from climate variability.

WFP is expanding operations in West Africa to feed an additional 1.4 million people hard hit by high food prices in Guinea, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burkina Faso and Senegal.

FAO has called for a renewed commitment to guarantee the right to food for the world's hundreds of millions of hungry people.

Read UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon message to mark World Food Day, which this year promotes the Right to Food.

WFP has welcomed a cash donation of US$10 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to its operations in West Africa, where many of the poorest people in the world are living under trying conditions.

On Sunday 21 May, more than 760,000 people in 118 countries and 420 locations, across 24 time zones, participated in Fight Hunger: Walk the World.

As the world focuses on a series of massive natural disasters and the spread of avian influenza, hunger in Africa has quietly climbed to an all-time high, threatening to destabilize much of the continent, warns James T. Morris, Executive Director of WFP.