Due to an increase in threats and attacks on humanitarian operations, WFP announced today that it is suspending its food assistance to roughly 1 million people in southern Somalia. According to a WFP statement, "recent attacks, threats, harassment and demands for payments by armed groups have decimated the humanitarian food lifeline, making it virtually impossible to reach up to to 1 million women and children and other highly vulnerable people."
The demands included a ban on employing women as well as thousands of dollars in payments to guarantee the safety of aid workers. "[Armed groups] also demanded that we do not deliver food to areas under their control," Peter Smerdon, WFP spokesperson, told CNN. "As they control 95 percent of the area, this was unacceptable to us."
Somalia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and one of the hungriest. Growing insecurity has left half of the population in need of food assistance, and more than 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes by conflict. Overall, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that 3.64 million Somalis were in need of humanitarian assistance in 2009.
Thankfully, WFP is still able to provide life-saving food distributions to about 1.8 million people in the rest of Somalia. Resources and staff are also being re-deployed from southern areas in the event that people begin moving away from areas where operations were suspended.
Without water, none of us would exist. For many of us in
the United States, where water is plentiful, this is not an everyday thought. In
places like Mali, however, it has become a constant concern.Mali’s Lake Faguibine System of four
interlinked lakes quickly dried up after a seven year drought in the 1970s, forcing
many farmers to leave the region.Three
years ago these conditions were unchanged as the desert continued to spread.
With hope dissipating, the population surrounding Lake
Faguibine looked for support from the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).
WFP stepped in with a Food for Assets program that provided those in need with
food while they opened up channels from other bodies of water in hopes of
bringing water back to the Lake Faguibine System. According to WFP, the area
“has again become an area of fertile land around a system of lakes offering
water for pastoralists and a plentiful supply of fish.”
Now farmers are starting to return to the area. Lack of
water is no longer a constant concern. Farmers and pastoralists have enough
water to feed both their animals and their crops. Vegetation now continues to
spread over areas once plagued by desertification.
Since the 1970s, drought has plagued this lake region of
Mali, but with the help of WFP and the strength of the local community, drought
has turned into fertility in just three years.
NBC Nightly News focused on rising temperatures and drought in Kenya last night with a report from the field. Severe, prolonged drought has left the land parched and unable to sustain the animals that many Kenyans rely on for food and income. Some farmers have even begun leading their cattle into the capitol city of Nairobi, where there is more grass. Conflict is also on the rise - one man interviewed by NBC was recently attacked by a rival tribe who wanted his land. Read a companion article to the video here.
-Alli Bailey
Communications Assistant
Friends of WFP
P.P.S. Support WFP with the Regift the Fruitcake campaign! Read our blog post here to find out how you can help feed the hungry with a virtual fruitcake.
A winter wonderland for the holiday season in some areas of the United States is always exciting.Snowball fights and snow days are a fun addition to many Americans' lives in winter. Yet as we bundle up and take the sled out of the basement, it is also important to think about how snow affects people in other parts of the world.
During the presence of heavy snow in Afghanistan, many roads are closed off, making food and fuel increasingly hard to find in certain areas. According to IRIN News, a number of districts have already been isolated due to snow on the roads. In the last few weeks, oil prices have gone up 10 percent and food prices have followed suit.
It was reported by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in the 2007-2008 National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (NRVA) that 7.4 million people, nearly a third of the population, were living with less than enough food to live a healthy life. Another 37 percent of the population was living on the border of food insecurity, meaning that with any change in harvest, weather, income or prices, families could find themselves slipping further into poverty. While access to food has increased and the harvests have improved since last year, weather has contributed to lack of food availability and increased poverty in certain areas.
WFP has worked in Afghanistan since 1963 and plans to feed 8.8 million people in 2009, predominantly in these rural food insecure regions.
So next time you put on your gloves and boots to go play in the snow, think about how snow has an impact on different countries. Take some time on your snow day to look up how you can help others around the world gain proper access to food even in times of extreme cold weather.
One of the United Nations World Food Program's (WFP) most important programs is its emergency response to natural disasters. WFP recently profiled several food assistance recipients who survived two of recent history's most destructive storms.
This past September, Joralyn Castillo's family was forced to flee their home in Manila when Typhoon Ketsana dumped torrential rains across part of the Philippines. After spending four days in an evacuation center, they returned to find that their house was underwater. "We lost so much in the floodwater: clothes, the children's things, books, things for school, all the bedding was covered in mud," said Castillo. Her husband, who had once made a modest living mending local roads, could not work in a flooded city, and the family had to begin borrowing money at high interest rates just to put food on the table.
Thanks to WFP's emergency response and recovery efforts in the Philippines, Castillo now receives rice supplies to help get her family back on its feet. Though much of her husband's wages now go to paying off debts, WFP's food assistance lifts a major burden off the family's backs as they begin to rebuild their lives.
Aye Aye now lives with her mother and uncle in a camp for displaced people, and she is taking an active role in helping rebuild her community. Along with many other locals, she receives food assistance from WFP while working on a project to rebuild a key road linking her village to the rest of the region. The food gives Aye Aye and her fellow volunteers the strength to improve their community and the hope for a better future.
-Alli Bailey
Communications Assistant
Friends of WFP
Yesterday, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP)
received a donation of $400,000 from the government of South Africa to aid food
security in Somalia and Ethiopia. The funding will be split evenly between the
two countries and comes at a crucial time for the recipients.
“This donation
will provide vital food rations to extremely vulnerable people in Ethiopia and
Somalia, helping them to cope with the devastating impact of drought, high food
prices and the global economic crisis,” said Ramiro Lopes da Silva, WFP Special
Envoy from the Horn of Africa.
With many of the world’s nations struggling with food
insecurity, Thanksgiving seems to be the perfect time to be thankful for what
we have, but also to be aware of what others don’t. Over 1 billion people in
the world are suffering from hunger, a number that continues to rise.
At this time, I would like to express my thanks. I give
thanks to the government of South Africa for aiding WFP in its food security
mission, I give thanks for the food I am privileged to have, and I give thanks
to working with this wonderful organization in making the necessity of food
possible for even more people around the world.
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) launched a
school meals pilot program yesterday in Iraq to contribute to food security as
well as boost school attendance. The program will reach 172,000 children this
year alone and hopes to expand next year to 960,000 children in some of the
most vulnerable districts. The program will provide each child with a
nutritious 80-gram date bar.
The date bars are produced in Egypt, but WFP plans for production
to eventually move to Iraq. Once this transfer occurs, it will go a long way in
boosting Iraq’s economic status and education levels, because large-scale
production of the nutritious bar will provide new jobs to help stimulate the
Iraqi economy. After 30 years of economic decline, WFP has been working
steadily to try to improve conditions for Iraqis since 1991.
While improved food security has dramatically improved
the quality of life in Iraq, the most recent analysis
by WFP and the government of Iraq shows that there is still work to be done.
The analysis, published in November 2008, finds that 930,000 people are still
in need of food assistance and 6.4 million more people are extremely vulnerable
to food insecurity should the Pubic Distribution System (PDS) fail to meet
their needs.
It is with this knowledge that WFP has decided to alter
the way it looks at food necessities in Iraq. WFP is now focusing on sustainable
food assistance programs that will allow communities to provide for themselves,
rather than rely on food aid, to combat the hunger that still affects the
country.WFP and the Iraqi government
are combining forces to meet the needs of the population by creating safety net
programs the government will able to enforce. One of these programs is the
school meals pilot program discussed above. We are extremely excited to see the
outcome of these new strategies as they really show the collaborative effort of
WFP and the Iraqi government in creating a more sustainable way of looking at
food assistance.
Read more about the School Meals Pilot Program in Iraq.
One of WFP's goals in providing assistance to the hungry is to help them help themselves. Long-term programs like Food for Assets and Purchase for Progress are designed to create sustainable infrastructure and markets that can be maintained by local governments and communities. One community in Bolivia is already seeing success as part of WFP's sustainable school feeding project, which encourages local food production and helps ensure that local governments are the main providers of school meals.
The Sumaj Sara association, an association of farmers in the Tupiza province of Bolivia, has begun supplying nutritious food for local children as part of a school meals program. In the first school semester of 2009 alone, the seven-member association sold 134,000 servings of horchata, a maize-based drink, to the local government for its school meals program.
Maize in the city of Tupiza was traditionally produced for sale on the national market, but support from WFP has allowed the members of Sumaj Sara to set up and manage a maize processing plant that provides food for local people. Similar projects are taking place across Bolivia, creating new business connections between small-scale farmers and local authorities.
The success of the Sumaj Sara association is especially impressive given Bolivia's difficulties with poverty and hunger - two-thirds of the country's 9.5 million people live below the poverty line. Frequent natural disasters make agriculture an unreliable source of income, and 27 percent of Bolivian children under age 5 suffer from stunted growth. WFP's current country program for Bolivia aims to feed about 80,000 poor children each year.
-Alli Bailey
Communications Assistant
Friends of WFP
