World is "losing the battle" against hunger: WFP

The world is "losing the battle" against hunger, the head of the World Food Program James Morris said.

Despite the efforts of government agencies and hundreds of NGOs, more than 800 million people were still chronically hungry and 24,000 people were dying daily of hunger or hunger-related health problems, he said.

"We are losing the battle against hunger," he told a panel of US lawmakers.

"Not only are we losing the battle in emergencies like those in Afghanistan, North Korea and Africa where we often lack the funds needed, we are losing the battle against the chronic hunger," Morris said in his
testimony.

Although poverty worldwide was reduced by 20 percent in the 1990s, he said, hunger was cut by barely five percent.

Moreover, the number of food emergencies were skyrocketing.

While in the first half of the 1990s the WFP conducted 18 emergency food needs assessments per year, in the second half the number nearly doubled to 33.

"In recent years we have been forced to become an ambulance service for the starving," Morris said.

"Nearly 80 percent of our work is now emergency driven," he said, cutting into the organization's ability to implement food for work, nutrition and education projects.

Even though the WFP's budget outsripped the United Nations in New York, the ever-growing global list of needs was forcing the organization to choose between emergencies.

"For lack of funds, WFP is now engaged in an exercise in triage among those threatened by starvation. Who will we feed? Who will we leave hungry?" he said.

"And now, a task that could dwarf all our earlier relief operations may well await us in Iraq if no political solution is found to the current impasse."

Morris appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations panel as part of a series of hearings on State Department budget authorization for fiscal year 2004, US foreign policy and the war on terrorism.

Source: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030226/1/389bs.html