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By Llanesca T. Panti, Reporter
Millions of people around the
world, including those caught in the crossfire between Philippine
government forces and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF),
would go hungry by the New Year if a $5.2-billion “human rescue
package” was excluded from the financial bailout and economic
stimulus tabled in Western Europe and the United States, the United
Nations World Food Program (WFP) warned on Wednesday.
Josette Sheeran, the food
program’s executive director, said with the UN arm expected to
feed nearly 100 million of the world’s hungriest people in 2009,
such amount is needed to support its programs combating global
hunger.
“Unless donors provide a rapid
injection of funds, the agency’s warehouse stocks will run out by
the end of March, that will leave millions of people in Haiti,
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya and other hunger
hot spots to live without essential food assistance,” Sheeran
added in a statement.
In the Philippines, most
activities of the program are in the Autonomous Region in Muslim
Mindanao and the provinces of Lanao del Norte, Lanao del Sur,
Maguindanao, North Cotabato, Shariff Kabunsuan, Sultan Kudarat,
Basilan and Sulu. These areas have been battlegrounds between
government troops and MILF rebels and other Muslim groups fighting
for their own Islamic homeland in Mindanao.
Stephen Anderson, the food
program’s country director for the Philippines, told The Manila
Times in September that the agency was still working to raise P7.6
million for humanitarian assistance in Mindanao.
According to 2008 data from the
program, over 21.5 percent of families do not have adequate access
to food for a healthy and active life, with the Mindanao population
comprising 19.7 percent of it. Worse, the data showed, over 30
percent of the children in Mindanao suffer from chronic
malnutrition.
Sheeran said that allocating just
1 percent of the money proposed for bailout packages across the
developed world would be enough to fund the operations of the World
Food Program, the largest humanitarian agency in the world.
“As we take care of Wall Street
and Main Street, we can’t forget the places that have no
streets,” she said during a recent visit to India, which has the
single largest undernourished population in the world.
Sheeran reported that this month
alone, the government of Kyrgyztan in central Asia asked the food
program to help feed its 600,000 people pushed into desperate hunger
after a sharp decline in the remittances, which account for 20
percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), or the
total value of goods and services produced in a country in a year.
A former US Undersecretary for
Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs in the State Department,
she also warned that a repeat of the bloody civil unrest in Haiti
that killed scores of people and sacked a prime minister because of
skyrocketing food prices is not far-fetched if the $5.2 billion is
not raised.
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