IRAQ: Food aid positioned, awaiting improved security

Instability and insecurity in Iraq is delaying the delivery of supplies to people in need.

Thousands of 50-kg sacks of flour lie on pallets stacked five metres high and extend more than 50 metres down the length of the dusty building in Kuwait city.

The flour, purchased by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), is destined for neighbouring Iraq, but is still stuck behind heavy metal doors an hour's drive away from the border.

The WFP public information officer in Kuwait, Antonia Paradela, said everything is in place for the wheat to be trucked to Iraq - except the security.

And despite some saying food is not an issue in Iraq at present, Paradela and others are warning that supplies need to be entering the country now in order to prevent a major catastrophe in several weeks when people's existing rations run out.

WFP is hoping to resurrect the food distribution system operated under the former UN-sanctioned Oil-for-Food Programme, which relied on 44,000 distribution agents spread throughout Iraq.

WFP predicts that its new food programme will represent the largest humanitarian effort in history, with four times as much food being required than was taken into Afghanistan after the conflict there. In all, 9,300 truckloads of food a month is needed to cope with the population's needs when their built-up stocks run out in a few weeks.

There were very few supplies of food left in Iraq from the old programme, Paradela said, and there were reports some warehouses had been looted, leaving nothing to distribute until WFP was able to get into the country.

Meanwhile, the spokeswoman in Kuwait for aid agency Mercy Corps, Cassandra Nelson, said the food situation in Iraq was a ticking bomb. "We’re talking about feeding the [whole] country," she said.

While people were not starving today, "there will be a massive, massive human catastrophe on our hands if we don’t get in there," she said. She also urged the international community to respond to WFP’s appeal for funding the new food programme, saying despite there being no TV images of starving people being beamed across the world, there was definitely a need - "and the need is now".

This Item is Delivered to the "Asia-English" Service of the UN's IRIN
humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views
of the United Nations.