LIBERIA: WFP prioritises returning refugees and IDPs in food distribution

MONROVIA, 4 Mar 2005 (IRIN) - The UN World Food Programme (WFP) says it is running out of food to help nearly one million people stay alive in Liberia, but it pledged on Friday to prioritise the distribution of rations to refugees and other displaced people returning to their home villages.

Justin Bagarishya, the WFP country director in Liberia, told IRIN that the returnees would receive the full 2,100 calorie per day food ration. However, other beneficiaries of WFP aid, including schools that serve free meals to their pupils, would continue to get a sharply reduced ration, he added.

The amount of food distributed by WFP to most beneficiaries in Liberia has been cut in stages since August to just 1,350 calories per day - 64 percent of the normal handout - due to a shortfall in funding from the international community.

"Our first priority will be those returnees and IDPs (internally displaced people)," Bagarishya said. "They will still receive the standard 2,100 kilocalories, but the reduction will affect the school feeding and other institutional feeding programmes," he added.

The WFP aims to help feed 940,000 people in Liberia this year - nearly a third of the country's population.

Most of the food aid will go towards facilitating the resettlement of 350,000 refugees and an estimated 300,000 IDPs following the end of a 14-year civil war in 2003.

However, WFP chief of staff Michael Stayton said donors were still being slow to stump up cash.

He warned that WFP would be forced to cut its handouts of bulgur wheat, maize meal, vegetable oil and protein-rich corn-soya blend again, unless it received an additional US$25 million of funding by May.

"We need to get additional food in by May to prevent a pipeline break in June," Stayton said during a visit to Liberia on Thursday.

He noted that WFP now had more food than it needed to feed victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami and one solution might be to redirect some of the surplus to West Africa.

"Most of the world's aid has been focussed on the Indian Ocean tsunami crisis and the WFP is now over-funded on its tsunami programme," Stayton told reporters."We are trying to look at the possibility of diverting some funding from the Indian Ocean to address the food aid needs in West Africa."

WFP says it needs $155 million this year to feed more than 1.5 million people affected by past and current conflicts in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire. However, it has only received 10 percent of this from international donors.

Stayton stressed the need to empty the IDP camps that sprang up around the capital Monrovia during the 1989-2003 civil war and return their inhabitants to the countryside where they could grow their own food once more.

"Last year we were feeding displaced people, but this year we want to feed people that are at home," he said. "If they are still in IDP camps it is going to drain valuable resources that could be invested where they (normally) live."

Bagarishya said although WFP had sharply reduced the food ration distributed to IDP camps in Liberia over the past seven months, a recent study by the French-based aid agency Action Contre La Faim (Action Against Hunger) had revealed that this cut had not resulted in malnutrition among camp residents.

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