WFP seeks funding for emergency cargo flights

The UN's World Food Programme said it is seeking an additional US $5 million to provide extra emergency relief cargo flights to towns in Angola no longer accessible by road because of security problems. In its latest emergency report, WFP said the flights were needed to transport food supplies to the central highland towns of Kuito and Huambo, and, further west, to Luena, the capital of Moxico province. Like other government-held towns in Angola, they have been under siege for months by UNITA rebel forces and subjected to sporadic shelling since the breakdown last December of the UN-brokered Lusaka Protocol peace accords. WFP said food distributions in July and August would only be able to cover an estimated 60 percent of the of the total food aid needs. "Of the approximately 120,000 mt of food needed in Angola in 1999, only about 60,000 mt have been received," the report said. The food agency added that in an effort to "maximise the effect of food assistance," WFP was focusing its interventions on the "most vulnerable." These included children under the age of five, pregnant women, the sick, elderly, and newly displaced people. WFP also described the food situation in Malanje, east of the capital Luanda, as "dramatic" because there had been no food deliveries to the besieged city since May. "Recent reports indicate that two or three people per day are dying from malnutrition-related diseases," the report said. WFP said that it was continuing with its food flight to Huambo between periods of shelling. The latest weekly report of the United Nations Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Unit (UCAH) in Luanda said that there was "clear evidence" of malnutrition among the population in Huambo. It said: "Some residents reach the different paediatric and feeding centres just in time." A new three-month emergency operation, which would feed about 80,000 people and cost an estimated US $37.5 million, is due to start in September, but WFP said that so far it had not received any donor contributions.