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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WFP was not designed to fight the deeper roots of hunger. (Within the U.N. that task falls to other agencies, like the Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.N. Development Program.) But WFP can help. Its Food for Assets plan gives rations to displaced persons in northern Uganda who work to build and run local fish farms. Procurement officers can buy locally at above-market prices if they show that it helps to develop the country's agriculture. And, across the world, WFP feeds about 20 million schoolchildren each year. That service is designed both to help students concentrate in class and to give parents a reason to send kids to school in the first place. In some regions where girls' attendance is especially low, girls get bonus rations to take home.

These programs are vital to what WFP workers call the "exit strategy" — getting to a point where food aid is unnecessary. But as food prices rise and budgets become less predictable, programs like these are also the first to be slashed. Martin Devenish, an Irish priest who runs a technical college near Moruongor parish, is proud to be teaching trades that could bring industry to Karamoja: carpentry, tailoring and bricklaying. Today dozens of adult students sit at benches, eating their midday meal, mostly corn provided by WFP. But each time the priest turns on the radio and hears about possible food-aid cuts, "I'm thinking what about here!," Devenish says.

His students are able-bodied men and women; no one will die if WFP cuts this service. Already the agency has planned an end to school feeding for 500,000 kids in Uganda's camps. The picture is the same across the world. School feeding was canceled in Cambodia for a month this spring because of a shortage of funds. In Sri Lanka, a food-for-work scheme to maintain irrigation systems was axed for the same reason. "In a sense we're mortgaging the long term to pay for the short term," says John Aylieff, WFP's global head of programs in Rome.

Back in Moruongor, as the day gets to its hottest, two men shout that the hand-outs have gone all wrong. "The ones who need food most can't fight for it," says one, Losike John D'Porox. "Widows, orphans, they should be fed first." Then everyone else, he asserts, should be enrolled in food-for-work programs, improving the roads, digging water ponds and farming. "That's what can help people," he says — and he may be right. Long-term, WFP's only way out of Karamoja will come when the region is self-sufficient once again. Getting there will take a predictable budget, more security, and time for forward planning — all luxuries now. And yet as the sun beats down on the squabbling crowds, no one here claims that WFP's efforts have been wasted. "We're happy!" one woman says, and she whoops with joy as she gets set to pick up her rations. Today, at least, fewer are going hungry. But tomorrow, others will be standing in the hot sun, waiting for food.