U.N. food aid funds growing, but needs growing too

By Missy Ryan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The World Food Program, facing an unprecedented surge in the price of food it buys for the world's hungry, has secured about 60 percent of the extra funds it needs to cover planned aid donations this year, the head of the United Nations agency said on Tuesday.

"We put out an extra appeal for $755 million and we're about 60 percent of the way there," WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran said during a speech at a Washington think tank.

But the agency said it already has had to cut some of the food rations it provides, and its $755-million gap does not include new, emerging hunger needs that will require an additional $418 million to $430 million this year.

Sheeran, a former Bush administration official, said the world's food delivery system was "groaning under the strain of sky-rocketing demand, the soaring cost of inputs, depleted stocks, crop loss due to drought, floods and severe weather."

Higher global prices for basic foodstuffs such as bread, rice and milk may have brought on a crisis that could be the first truly globalized humanitarian emergency, she said.

World leaders are calling for urgent steps to ease the soaring costs, to create a larger cushion of food across harvests, and to diffuse the food panic that has triggered protests across the developing world.

"It is said that a hungry man is an angry man," Sheeran said. Global food prices jumped an annual 43 percent through March, according to the U.S. government.

The trend is believed to be deepening poverty, especially for food-importing nations like Nicaragua, pushing more people into hunger as buying power shrinks for food aid budgets.