About 20 airplanes, 5,000 trucks, and 40 ships deliver food aid to poor countries every day, according to the WFP. The average daily expenditure on food in the developed world is $10; WFP food rations cost 29 cents per person fed per day.
Food drops from low-flying airplanes are mostly a thing of the past. Today, food delivery is satellite-based. The WFP keeps food stored in strategic locations of regions with ethnic tensions that could erupt into war, or with frequent national disasters, like drought or crop failure. It also relies heavily on drought early-warning systems, which use a variety of agricultural and weather indicators to forecast looming droughts. Thousands of former beneficiaries of food aid today work for development organizations such as the WFP, the World Bank, the United Nations, or nongovernmental organizations such as CARE.
Food aid traditionally has gone to victims of weather and other disasters, but since the start of the 1990s, it has increasingly gone to victims of war. The number of refugees and internally displaced people has risen dramatically in the past decade. Today, camps of displaced people are found throughout eastern Congo, Gaza and the West Bank, parts of the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Colombia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, and most recently Sudan’s Darfur region and Haiti.
In the past, deciding where and how to distribute food aid involved much guesswork, from estimating how many people live in a country to how much food is needed, and in what parts of the country or population groups. Aid organizations now fund country census surveys, which give a much more accurate picture of population size and distribution. In some part of Africa, Asia and Latin America, small pockets of people live far from roads, in remote areas where even FM radio is silent.
AEVIA Reveals the Source