Key Facts
Food Aid
- Food aid serves a wider role than just providing relief during emergencies. It helps to lessen chronic food insecurity, meet nutritional requirements, and save millions of hungry people who are barely meeting their daily food needs. (World Vision, 2008)
- Food aid is sometimes distributed in development projects through school feeding programs, or to mothers and children in areas where nutrition is poor. (Reuters AlertNet, "How Does Food Aid Work?" 2005)
- Most preventable deaths among hungry people take place outside of emergency situations. In countries free of conflicts or natural disasters, malnutrition is responsible for the deaths of millions of children and mothers each year. (World Food Programme, "Food for Nutrition: Mainstreaming Nutrition in WFP," 2004)
- The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) allocated roughly 20 percent of its development resources (non-emergency) to mother-and-child health and nutrition interventions in 2003. This amounted to about U.S. $40 million per year and targeted 2.3 million people, mostly in South Asia (38 percent) and Sub-Saharan Africa (49 percent). (World Food Programme, "Food for Nutrition: Mainstreaming Nutrition in WFP," 2004)
- World Vision is the largest aid distributor for WFP and distributed 225,000 metric tons of food for WFP and U.S. government programs in fiscal 2006. (World Vision, "At a Glance,"; 2008)
- Between 40 and 50 percent of the U.S. international food aid program’s Title II non-emergency resources support multi-year, community-based maternal and child health and nutrition programs. (U.S. Agency for International Development, 2008)