World Food Program: On the Front Lines of Hunger

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READY TO RECEIVE: Residents of Karamoja district, northeastern Uganda, say that until the WFP arrived, they were eating once a day at most

Photograph for TIME by Walter Astrada

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The Uncertainty Principle
In some ways WFP is more like a global shipping company than an aid agency. Every Monday through Friday — weekends too if there's an emergency — empty trucks pull up at the warehouse in Kampala, bound for destinations around Uganda and neighboring countries. Nearly 200 porters jog around the warehouse, a steady stream of men carrying 100-lb (50 kg) bags of food on their heads. Trains and trucks arrive full from local traders and from the port city of Mombasa, Kenya, where ships bring donated food from the U.S. and other Western countries. (About two-thirds of WFP's food here is purchased locally, and one-third is donated in kind.) A local bean supplier arrives. Two women in blue lab coats take samples, check that there isn't too much extra matter mixed in and weigh the bags. The porters then run the food into the warehouse and stack it in neat rows and columns to form elaborate, sheer-faced structures as high as three-story buildings. On average last year porters like these across Uganda handled more than 1,000 metric tons of food — tens of thousands of bags, all loaded and unloaded manually — every single day. "Whatever comes in goes out almost immediately," says Konjit Kidane, the Ethiopian who is WFP's head of logistics for Uganda.

Kidane unfurls a map of the region upon which is printed rail and road routes, and the costs associated with each port and passage. The map was printed in 2006, so the printed prices are now out of date. But Kidane has bigger problems. As food and fuel prices rise, suppliers have begun defaulting on their contracts; they are either unable to provide goods at a previously agreed price because input costs have increased, or unwilling to sell food at the old rate now that others will pay more. "We used to have sufficient stock — four months, five months — in the pipeline," Kidane says. By May there were three, and the situation is only worsening.

Worldwide, WFP boasts that its overhead costs are no more than 7% of total operating budget. But today's food and fuel shortages don't just mean higher costs; they also introduce new elements of unpredictability to getting aid to those who need it. The day after distributing to Lokali parish, WFP officers in Karamoja are out again in nearby Moruongor. But the food trucks only trundle up to the distribution point at noon, three hours after recipients began gathering along the side of the dirt road. The reason for the delay: the weekend's diesel delivery never arrived from Kampala. "We spent most of the morning getting the little bit of fuel out of the other trucks so we could fill two to drive here," says Simon Okiseng, a senior field worker. "If the fuel doesn't arrive today, there will be no distribution tomorrow."

All this compounds the enduring logistical challenges that Africa presents for aid agencies: poor roads, unpredictable weather and political instability. After Kenya's disputed election in December, a U.S. shipment of 9,000 metric tons of sorghum was blocked for more than 100 days in Mombasa, with no safe way to get it out, Kidane says. Violence returned to Burundi after a ceasefire deal failed, so WFP must postpone plans to stop feeding Burundian refugees in Tanzania. WFP is sometimes a target of violence too. Darfur rations were cut by nearly half in May because too many trucks had been hijacked. Distribution was suspended briefly in Karamoja last year after cattle rustlers ambushed a convoy and shot dead the lead driver. The trucks, returning from a delivery, were all empty.

A Way Out
"I would say over the medium to long term, I am an optimist," Sheeran says in London, "because the world knows how to grow enough food." That may be so. But food aid is not devoid of controversy. On the one hand, of course, no one wants to see people starve. At the hospital where James Lemukol is superintendent, a mother cradles her 3-year-old son; he's always been too weak to learn to stand. Others arrive so swollen — their bellies distended and extremities bloated from the fluid that leaks out of weakened blood vessels — that medical staff have trouble finding veins for the IV lines needed to fight malaria or other opportunistic infections. But on the other hand, there has always been the risk that long-term food aid simply encourages populations to stay on land that can no longer sustain them.