World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

Mohamud Hassan Guuleed, the spokesman of WFP for Somalia has said on Tuesday that WFP signed a deal with the Islamic administration in Middle Jubba region in southern Somalia. Mr. Guuled who is in Nairobi told Shabelle radio that the agreement was about how the World Food Program agency would work again in Middle Jubba region afer the Islamic administration in the region accused the aid agencies for supplying an expired food for the people in the region that caused to their work in the region.

Thousands of Somalis are suffering from malnutrition, a lack of clean water and poor sanitation conditions, putting Somali children at particularly high risk, a United Nations report says. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs cautions that Somalis could become more vulnerable to waterborne diseases, which are responsible for a fifth of the deaths among children under the age of five in Somalia. Some 200,000 Somalia children are “acutely malnourished” and a quarter of them are in need of immediate treatment in order to survive, OCHA says. [...] The U.N says three million Somalis, nearly a third of the population, will remain dependent on humanitarian assistance this year. “We’re seeing a continued deterioration of the nutrition situation in Somalia in certain areas,” said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the World Food Programme (WFP). “I was in Somalia in December in a town on the border with Ethiopia where the nearest proper clinic was 70 kilometers away, with very little option to get there other than by foot,” he told The Media Line. A newly elected president in Somalia could bring positive developments and greater stability, but Marcus said the situation was still difficult.

How many people still live in Somalia? No one knows. The UN says around 10m. Just as Somalia’s problems of jihadism and piracy have gone global, so have its people. [...] Dozens of aid workers, campaigners and journalists, most of them locals, have been killed in the past year or so. Hundreds more have been beaten, threatened or forced into exile. [...] Just as this correspondent was about to visit southern Somalia with people from the UN’s World Food Programme, the trip was cancelled when two of the agency’s workers were shot dead and a third died on an airstrip waiting for medical help.

Gunmen kidnapped a Pakistani national working on a farming project in Somalia's semi-autonomous northern region of Puntland on Sunday, a government official said. [...] Two Somali nationals working for the U.N.'s World Food Programme were killed by gunmen last month in the south of the Horn of Africa nation.

NATO defense ministers have agreed to carry out another anti-piracy naval operation off the coast of Somalia, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer announced on Thursday. "You can expect to see another, what we call, Standing NATO Maritime Group off the coast of Somalia in the coming months, contributing to the overall international (anti-piracy) effort," he told a press conference at the NATO defense ministers' meeting. He said, however, details of the operation remain to be worked out. The ships will be from the Standing NATO Maritime Group 1, which consists of six warships, he said. [...] NATO carried out its first anti-piracy mission off Somalia between October and December 2008. Four NATO warships were deployed, resulting in the safe delivery of 30,000 tons of humanitarian aid to Somalia by the World Food Program.

NATO's new anti-piracy flotilla will leave next month bound for the Horn of Africa where it will join an EU task force already patrolling the region, Germany's defense minister said Friday. Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said Germany will contribute a frigate and a tanker to the six-vessel naval squadron. They will join the EU task force, code-named Operation Atalanta, which is the first naval action undertaken by the bloc. Other nations — including the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Norway, Denmark and the U.S. — also have offered their warships to the anti-piracy force known as the Standing NATO Maritime Group I. [...] Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991 and nearly half the population is dependent on aid. This is provided mainly by the U.N. World Food Program, whose chartered ships had repeatedly come under pirate attack before the original NATO flotilla arrived in November.

Hardline Islamist insurgents in southern Somalia told international aid agencies on Tuesday to hand out all the food aid in their warehouses, or leave the Horn of Africa nation. Islamist al Shabaab rebels and allied groups control large swathes of southern and central Somalia while the government has little influence on the ground beyond a few blocks of the capital Mogadishu. [...] Hussein Abdi Gheddi, the governor of middle Jubba region in southern Somalia and a member of al Shabaab, told the World Food Programme (WFP) and World Vision to hand out their food. "We are telling them to leave the region, or else to distribute the food aid in the stores for the people in the region," Gheddi told Reuters by telephone from the town of Buale. Gunmen killed two WFP workers in January and the U.N. agency said on Tuesday it was seeking new security commitments from armed groups to conduct food distribution. "We are sending our teams around south, central Somalia asking for a security commitment that we will be allowed to operate and our staff will not be attacked," said WFP spokesman, Peter Smerdon, in neighbouring Kenya. "We will not risk the lives of our staff if armed groups don't give us such commitments," he said.

Somalia has the sad distinction of being the quintessential failed state. It is also one of the most underreported disasters in the world. The one phenomenon that penetrates international headlines—piracy—is the offshore symptom of a land-based problem. [...] It is therefore most unsettling, to say the least, when a special representative of the secretary-general of the United Nations for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, speaks about the work of Somali journalists in highly derogatory, indeed inflammatory terms. [...] In the humanitarian community—to which I migrated from the world of pure journalism—our operating space is also shrinking due to security concerns, and Somalia is among the most dangerous places in the world. In 2008, two dozen aid workers were reported killed in Somalia, and this year, two employees of the World Food Program were shot dead, while four employees of Action Against Hunger and two European Commission-contracted pilots are currently being held hostage along with around 20 other humanitarian workers.

[...] The frigate HMS Northumberland has just completed her first main convoy escort of merchant shipping in the pirate-infested waters off the coast of Somalia. Leaving the Kenyan port of Mombasa in late January, the frigate was protecting four merchant vessels carrying cargoes of food vital to the famine relief effort in Somalia as part of the EU-led counter-piracy operation codenamed Atalanta. [...] Throughout this time, and especially as they came close inshore, Northumberland with her detachment of Royal Marines was at constant high alert — but the handover of food aid to Somali and World Food Programme security forces was accomplished without incident.

Somali pirates are poised for renewed attacks on shipping off the coast of Somalia, according to the Royal Navy's Cdr Gerry Northwood, the head of operations for the EU's anti-piracy taskforce, codenamed Operation Atalanta. The multinational force, commanded by a British Rear Admiral, was deployed in December with the principal aim of protecting vulnerable food ships travelling to Somalia.