World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

MBABANE –As the festive season approaches, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) will be celebrating - along with 97,000 orphans and 33,000 other vulnerable children - with the resumption of food distributions to 1,600 Swaziland neighbourhood care points. The service was disrupted earlier this year due to lack of funding.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) honours World Food Day (16 October) by reaffirming its dedication to work with communities, civil society, governments and the private sector to end hunger in our lifetimes.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) signed a landmark agreement in Botswana on 25 May 2012 to work together to fight food insecurity in the 15 member countries of the SADC region of southern Africa.

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 expressed deep concern over erratic weather patterns in southern Africa which have devastated harvest prospects for millions of people, and could spell yet another year of widespread food shortages.

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) on Friday welcomed US government contributions in June totaling $62 million to feed people confronting humanitarian crises across 13 countries in Africa and one in Asia.

A prolonged dry spell and high temperatures ravaged Swaziland’s maize crop in 2007, resulting in the lowest annual harvest on record and leaving more than a third of the population in need of food assistance, according to a report issued today by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and WFP.

WFP has announced that unless it receives new contributions urgently it will be forced to halt food distributions to 90,000 orphans and vulnerable children in Namibia by the second half of December because of a critical shortage of funding.

WFP has warned that despite better harvests across southern Africa, more than three million people will remain short of food because of chronic vulnerability caused by grinding poverty and the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS.