by Matthew Tyler Funk

Created on: October 13, 2010

The World Food Program (WFP) is the food aid branch of the United Nations. Established in 1963 by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations General Assembly, the World Food Program today has a presence in over 80 countries, and feeds an average of 90 million people each year.

The WFP is especially focused on ending childhood hunger. On average just under two thirds of the recipients of the WFP's humanitarian food aid are children, accounting for about 58 million of the 90 million people who receive humanitarian food aid from the program each year.

According to the World Food Program's mission statement, the goal of the organization is to eradicate hunger and malnutrition worldwide and to eventually end the need for humanitarian aid. The strategies the organization undertakes in pursuit of these goals are to provide food aid to refugees in war-torn or disaster-stricken areas; to provide food aid to particularly vulnerable populations at critical times in their lives and to ostensibly build self-reliance of poor people and communities, specifically through labor intensive work programs.

There is also a lot of evidence of corruption within the World Food Program. In a leaked March 2010 UN Report it was revealed that as much as half of the humanitarian aid going to Somalia has been diverted to corrupt contractors and militants.

The organization's "Fast IT Telecommunications Emergency and Support Team" is another source of potential controversy. This branch of the organization is a commercial operation, offering services to humanitarian groups at market price in a "cost recovery" scheme. The organization's Emergency IT team does not operate on a humanitarian basis, so if there is not money involved to pay for it's deployment, there will be no Emergency IT team deployment. This theoretically, if not in practice, delays the process because the funding of an emergency response cannot begin until after the emergency has taken place.

Criticism also comes from what are seen as superficial programs conducted by the organization, such as the Walk the World hunger awareness walk, which is a day on which a lot of people all over the world walk. This produces no tangible results towards ending global hunger, but vast quantities of resources are arguably wasted promoting the event internationally.

A similarly superficial approach is the organization's promotion of the website www.freerice.com, on which the viewer is asked trivia questions and for each question correctly answered they concerned viewer is able to raise and donate "ten grains of rice." There is obviously no realistic connection between correctly answering trivia questions by the viewers of this webpage and the ten grains of rice being donated, but the idea is representative of the sort of disconnected superficial approaches the WFP has tended to take in its long and largely unsuccessful campaign to solve world hunger.

The organization is also involved in the major distribution of genetically modified crops and environmentally destructive methods of farming. Although the intentions of the organization are good, when examined more than superficially it becomes clear that this agency of the United Nations has become corrupted and needs to be drastically overhauled.

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