Fighting hunger worldwide: The World Food Programme’s year in review, 2010

The World Food Programme's (WFP) 2010 review describes the disasters that punctuated 2010, such as the earthquake in Haiti, the tidal wave of floodwaters in Pakistan, and other disasters such as drought in the eastern regions of Africa’s arid Sahel. Particularly hard hit was Niger, where child malnutrition rates soared to alarming heights and hunger threatened nearly half the country’s 15 million people.

As the United Nations frontline agency in the fight against hunger, WFP's goal is to lend a helping hand to the world’s chronically hungry, whose numbers declined in 2010 for the first time in 15 years but still reached astaggering 925 million people. Good nutrition remained central to WFP, whose programmes ensure that the weak and the vulnerable get the right food at the right time to lead healthy and productive lives.

WFP responses include:

•  WFP brought food assistance during the year to more than 109 million people. Some 89 million of those beneficiaries – 82 percent – were women and children.
  

• Not all of that food was employed for emergency relief. Some was used to support a wide array of programmes helping communities build better futures by bridging the gap between immediate relief and longer term recovery. Other supplies were deployed to meet a range of specific targets, most notably to help people no longer able to afford to feed themselves because of persistent high food prices.
  

• WFP focused on providing the right nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life – from the womb to two years of age – to lay the foundations that help a child grow into a healthy adult. For children over 2, the 1,000 days plus approach supported school meals programmes that provided a nutritious meal or snack to more than 21 million children last year.
  

• WFP’s continuing search for innovative hunger solutions also represents an investment in the future. Cutting edge technology also figured heavily in the sophisticated tools WFP deployed throughout the year to prepare communities for disasters and limit their impact.