China teams up with the WFP to combat hunger

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, December 21, 2003

China teams up with the WFP to combat hunger

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Executive Director James Morris of the World Food Program, or WFP, just finished his three-day visit to the Chinese capital. During his meetings with Chinese officials, the world's largest humanitarian agency and the most populous country have pledged to step up cooperation to fight global hunger.

As the world's largest humanitarian agency, W-F-P fed a record 110 million people across 82 countries in 2003. Now with help from China, they are to explore ways of strengthening their decades-old partnership to address the growing problem of chronic malnutrition, which afflicts 840 million people worldwide.

Since 1979, WFP has fed 32 million Chinese, but plans to phase out assistance to the country by the end of 2005. China attained overall food self-sufficiency in the mid-1990s, but there are still pockets of need.

Beijing now commits twice the value of resources WFP raises for China, providing 37 million US dollars for the agency's local operation last year. Since 2000, China has committed almost 5 million US dollars for WFP's work elsewhere in the world, the bulk of the funding going to Africa.

In addition to supplying food aid to needy countries through WFP, Morris proposed China help identify ways of responding better to natural disasters that provoke sudden food shortages, especially in the Asian region. As China is a country where natural disasters are relatively frequent, it is experienced in managing the consequences of these disasters.

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