World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

WFP said a second round of food distributions started today to 122,500 people either driven from Mogadishu or who had recently returned but warned that a new spate of piracy threatened to strangle WFP’s main supply routes to Somalia.

A convoy of trucks contracted by WFP has thrust out of Mogadishu and delivered enough food to feed at least 32,000 people driven from their homes by some of the worst fighting in the Somali capital in 16 years.

James T. Morris, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), told a US Senate hearing on food aid Thursday that conquering hunger was critical to achieving peace and prosperity in the future.

WFP and a Somali partner have started giving daily meals to tens of thousands of desperately hungry people in the capital Mogadishu -- the agency’s first ‘wet feeding’ in Somalia since the 1993 humanitarian emergency.

Three United Nations agencies urge donors to support an appeal for a full package of assistance to cut malnutrition rates at crisis levels among children under five in refugee camps in Kenya. They warn that a host of problems linked with persistently high malnutrition had to be tackled now to save lives.

WFP today said it was stepping up a drive to deliver food to almost 100,000 of the 365,000 people driven from their homes in Mogadishu by the worst fighting in 16 years. WFP expects the number could quickly rise to as many as 150,000.

WFP has announced that the MV Rozen, a WFP-contracted vessel, was hijacked off the coast of north-eastern Somalia, somewhere near Bargal, north of Hafun in the state of Puntland at around 0935 yesterday, Sunday, 25 February 2007.

WFP started dropping food into Somalia and Kenya from aircraft over the weekend, expanding its campaign by land, water and air to assist more than a million people suffering because of floods cutting roads and spreading sickness.

A Boeing 747 jumbo jet chartered by WFP has landed in Nairobi, delivering 94 metric tons of high energy biscuits from a depot in Brindisi, Italy, for hundreds of thousands of victims of Kenya’s largest floods in years.

WFP has launched a regional air operation to provide fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to transport aid workers and humanitarian assistance to more than a million people in Somalia and Kenya hit by the worst floods in years.