The World Food Program

The World Food Program - a United Nations agency - is the world's largest food aid agency. It supplies food to an average of 90 million poor people annually to meet their nutritional needs, including 58 million hungry children living in 80 of the world's poorest countries.

How it works
WFP reaches out to hungry and malnourished people who cannot help themselves, through emergency operations and longer-term development programmes. All these programmes - initiatives are supported mainly financially by public or private donors. Governments are the agency's biggest donor: more than 60 governments support the WFP operations around the world.

The WFP's beneficiaries are, among others, victims of war and natural disasters, families affected by HIV/AIDS, orphans and school children in poor communities.

The Problems
The rising tide of civil conflict, war and natural disasters in the world's poorest nations has led to a near explosion in food emergencies - up from an average of 15 per year in the 1980s to more than 30 per year since 2000. Floods or any droughts can destroy the livelihoods of the hungry and poor in a matter of hours.

Diseases like HIV/AIDS have all kinds of devastating effects in the growing number of children that will end up orphans. Studies, for example, show that children who have lost one parent are at greater risk of chronic malnutrition than children from two parent households.

Furthermore, over a quarter of today's 400 million hungry children do not attend school. Two-thirds of them are girls. Research confirms that basic education is the most effective investment to improve economies and create literate, self-reliant and healthy societies.To all these, malnutrition stunts growth, intellectually and physically and ultimately damages children's productivity as adults.

The answers
WFP's development aid temporarily frees the poor of the need to provide food for their families, giving them time and resources to invest in lasting assets such as better houses, clinics and schools, new agricultural skills and technology. All these, obviously, are intended to create a better future.

In addition, home based care programmes that target the chronically ill are used to identify and reach the vulnerable children by helping them to get access to good nutrition and education.

Moreover, WFP also supports school feeding programmes. When meals are provided at school, enrolment increases dramatically and performance improves. As the largest provider of nutritious meals to poor school children, WFP has launched a global campaign aimed at ensuring the world's 400 million undernourished children are educated. In 2006 WFP fed some 20 million school children in 74 countries, for an average of €0.25 per meal.

In general, in 2006 alone, the agency helped approximately 63.4 million victims of humanitarian crises.