World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

Qalai Maksud, TAJIKISTAN -- For Khosiyat and Gulru, second grade students in School #86 in Qalai Maksud village, this school year is different. The school, which is in Tajikistan’s deforested eastern Rasht district, has received fruit trees from WFP and the two girls are now responsible for taking care of a pear tree and an apple tree each.

Nazri Azizova is sitting on the floor of her small house in southern Tajikistan where a WFP staff member has just brought a small miracle into her life...read the story to know what is that miracle.

For a sister and brother in eastern Tajikistan, the Central Asian New Year celebration brings art to their WFP school feeding programme and their father home from Russia.

“Children represent only 20 percent of our population but they are 100 percent of our future.”
 -- Vladimir Chernigov

On the tiny portion of Tajikistan that is not covered with mountains, trees explode with green leaves and the brown earth is carpeted with sprouting vegetables.

The people in five villages of the remote Rasht Valley in eastern Tajikistan had good reason to celebrate the annual "Navruz" or Central Asian New Year in March, as WFP delivered much appreciated food at the tail end of a hard winter. Five  "jamoats" -- villages -- in Rasht were cut off by fighting late last year between government and insurgent forces, and the people were caught between, unable to move freely, tend their farms or go to the market to purchase food. Once the snow and ice melted and the roads were again passable, WFP conducted a special distribution for some 4,600 grateful people in the villages, for whom the fortified wheat flour, enriched vegetable oil, salt and dried peas will keep them going until the first spring crops appear.

It’s going to be a hard, cold winter in the Rasht Valley as the people living in this isolated region of Tajikistan take stock of their meager food supplies. Here, more than elsewhere in this Central Asian country, one blow after another has hammered at the fragile food security of households reliant on small-scale farming and household garden plots in order to eat

After falling ill with stage II tuberculosis, Zebinisso Idibekova's future looked bleak. She couldn't afford the medication and was growing weaker by the day. But a combination of nutritious food and free medication have brought her back from the edge -- and ensured her son stays in school.

Record downpours this May brought a rash of flooding to the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes. WFP is appealing for $600,000 in relief assistance to help them through the emergency.

WFP staged a lively and colourful “welcome ceremony” for the arrival of a large Russian donation of fortified wheat flour in the capital of Dushanbe. Russian diplomats later visited a school in rural Tajikistan where Russia supports a WFP school meals programme.