We bring life-saving relief in emergencies and use food assistance to build peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.
Our work
We span a broad range of activities, bringing life-saving assistance in emergencies and supporting sustainable and resilient livelihoods to achieve a world with zero hunger.
Mission
The World Food Programme (WFP) is the leading humanitarian organization saving lives and changing lives, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience.
As the international community has committed to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition by 2030, one in nine people worldwide still do not have enough to eat. Food and food-related assistance lie at the heart of the struggle to break the cycle of hunger and poverty.
For its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict, WFP was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020.
In 2022, WFP assisted about 160 million people, a historic high.
On any given day, WFP has 6,500 trucks, 20 ships and 140 aircraft on the move, delivering food and other assistance to those in most need. These numbers lie at the roots of WFP’s unparalleled reputation as an emergency responder, one that gets the job done quickly at scale in the most difficult environments.
WFP’s efforts focus on emergency assistance, relief and rehabilitation, development aid and special operations. Two-thirds of our work is in conflict-affected countries where people are three times more likely to be undernourished than those living in countries without conflict.
In emergencies, WFP is often first on the scene, providing food assistance to the victims of war, civil conflict, drought, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, crop failures and natural disasters. When the emergency subsides, WFP helps communities rebuild shattered lives and livelihoods. We also work to strengthen the resilience of people and communities affected by protracted crises by applying a development lens in our humanitarian response.
WFP development projects focus on nutrition, especially for mothers and children, addressing malnutrition from the earliest stages through programmes targeting the first 1,000 days from conception to a child’s second birthday, and later through school meals.
WFP is the largest humanitarian organisation implementing school feeding programmes worldwide and has been doing so for over 50 years. In 2022, WFP provided nutritious meals, school snacks or take-home rations to 20 million children.
WFP’s use of cash-based transfers continues to grow further and faster than ever before. In 2022, WFP disbursed US$3.1 billion in cash-based transfers to nearly 49 million beneficiaries. By buying food as close as possible to where it is needed, we can save time and money on transport costs, and help sustain local economies. Increasingly, WFP meets people’s food needs through cash-based transfers that allow the people we serve to choose and shop for their own food locally.
In 2022, WFP raised a record-breaking US$14.1 billion in contributions. WFP has over 23,000 staff worldwide, of whom almost 90 percent are based in the countries where the agency provides assistance.
The first development programme is launched in Sudan
2020
WFP is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
September 1962, northern Iran. An earthquake strikes the area of Boein Zahra. More than 12,000 people die. Thousands of houses are destroyed. Cataclysmic for its victims, the tremor is also a baptism of fire for the World Food Programme: the institution has only existed for a matter of months. Even so, it quickly sends survivors 1,500 metric tons of wheat, 270 tons of sugar and 27 tons of tea.
Created in 1961 (at the behest of US President Dwight Eisenhower) as an experiment to provide food aid through the UN system, WFP is to be reassessed within three years. As crises multiply, the experiment proves its worth. A typhoon makes landfall in Thailand. Newly independent Algeria must repatriate and feed its war refugees. In every case, WFP rises to the task. Its mission is emergency aid, but also rehabilitation. A first development programme is launched in 1963 for Nubians in Sudan.
That same year, WFP’s first school meals project – in Togo – is approved. The principle of food aid as a central plank of emergency and development aid gains ground. In 1965, WFP is enshrined as a fully-fledged UN programme: it is to last for “as long as multilateral food aid is found feasible and desirable”.
Subsequent decades consolidate WFP’s role. Crises spill over the years, revealing hunger’s deadly prevalence, marking the conscience of humanity. But catastrophe spurs resourcefulness. The logistics of food aid are revolutionised. During the long famines which affect the western Sahel in the 1970s, WFP uses everything in its power – from car to camel, from road to river – to assist those in need. Thirty cargo aircraft, drawn from 12 national air forces, take to the airs. Ethiopia’s famine of 1984 further concentrates minds and means: WFP delivers 2 million tons of food. In 1989, Operation Lifeline Sudan is launched: leading a consortium of UN agencies and charities alongside UNICEF, WFP releases 1.5 million tons of food into the skies above was has since become South Sudan. The dawn-to-dusk, 20-aircraft, three-sorties-a-day airdrop remains, to this day, the largest in history. It saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
At the turn of the 1990s, regained freedom for many nations co-exists with hardship and fragmentation. Impoverishment forms a unifying backdrop to natural disasters, wars and the break-up of states. In WFP’s portfolio, the balance of development programmes versus emergency interventions shifts back and forth. The Rwandan genocide unfolds as Yugoslavia disintegrates. Again, WFP is there. In Kosovo in 1999, it establishes a network of mobile bakeries. As the decade closes, a global consensus takes hold that hunger cannot be fought in a void; that its underlying causes must be tackled. With the Kyoto Protocol, the world acknowledges the impact of a changing climate: a new conceptual umbrella takes shape for WFP’s longer-term aid projects. Perspectives deepen. Partnerships multiply. Non-governmental organizations consolidate their role in humanitarian and development assistance. WFP espouses this dynamic, increasingly forging alliances in an all-round effort to beat hunger.
The year 2000 brings the Millennium Development Goals, the first global blueprint for a world free from poverty, hunger and related ills. Under pressure to deliver measurable achievement, energies coalesce further. Many countries see governance standards improve, even as others grapple with conflict and insecurity. Extreme poverty recedes. The decade is not without its big humanitarian crises (the Asian tsunami of 2004 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010 both demand massive intervention), but WFP finds the space to pursue innovation. Amid intense renewal, both conceptual and technological, the agency’s mission evolves. Food aid gives way to food assistance, a more comprehensive, longer-lens approach to communities’ and societies’ nutritional needs. The provision of cash and vouchers emerges as an empowering complement to in-kind food distributions. The world’s first regular humanitarian air service,UNHAS is born. New, integrated monitoring systems allow WFP to assess food security landscapes with unprecedented accuracy. When emergencies strike, WFP handles frontline telecommunications and provides logistical support to all UN agencies and NGOs. Digital platforms are developed that greatly improve operational efficiency and – as seen in the Nepali earthquake of 2015 – offer those in need the ability to receive food within hours. The year before, the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa had successfully tested the humanitarian community’s ability to act as one – in no small part, thanks to a Logistics Cluster managed by WFP. The “workable scheme to provide food aid” had grown into the world’s leading humanitarian organization.
Today, WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian agency saving lives and changing lives. When disasters strike, it is quick off the mark and scales up in a heartbeat; when they do not, it works tirelessly to bolster nutrition and food security. Its field presence is deep; its operational understanding of food needs, unrivalled.
In October 2020, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize to WFP “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.”
While the adoption of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development has been a cause for optimism, the challenges remain stark. Over the past few years, the combined effects of conflict, climate extremes and rising costs, coupled with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated by the fallout of the war in Ukraine, have led to an unprecedented global food crisis. Up to 828 million people still go to bed hungry every night. Even as it strives to assist the victims or war and want, WFP is working with national governments, civil society, other partners and sister agencies to provide life-changing solutions that can address the root causes of hunger and malnutrition and bring the world closer to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2 – zero hunger.
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