The UN World Food Programme and the Development of Food Aid (Broché)

The world produces food to provide every citizen with an adequate diet for a healthy and productive life. Yet the hungry-poor, comprising one-fifth of the developing world's population, do not have enough to eat. The coexistence of hunger with the capacity to end it is one of the gravest paradoxes of our time. It is not only morally repugnant but politically, economically and socially indefensible. Food aid has evolved and developed from the disposal of unwanted surpluses to its constructive use in both meeting emergencies and assisting development in the developing countries. Against this backdrop, the World Food Programme (WFP) was created as the food aid arm of the United Nations system with the aim of reaching and benefiting abjectly poor people in the world's poorest countries with two of their greatest needs - food and work. From modest beginnings as a three-year experiment in 1963-5, WFP grew to become the main source of international food aid for both disaster relief and development. This dual rote has put WFP in the front line of the United Nations attack on hunger, poverty and food insecurity. In describing WFP's evolution, the book, the first comprehensive history of the organization, contains material which appears in the public domain for the first time. It provides details of the diversity and versatility of food aid in assisting developing countries in many fields of development and its vital rote in meeting natural and man-made disasters.