WFP suspends planned assessment to north.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has suspended a planned assessment mission to the town of Bumbuna, northern Sierra Leone, where 12,000 people were being helped, the UN food aid agency said. In an emergency report on Thursday, WFP said 7,000 of the needy were internally displaced persons and that the mission would resume as soon as the area was safe enough. In the eastern town of Daru, 7.6 percent of 590 children screened in a nutritional survey by the NGOs Merlin and Goal have global acute malnutrition, WFP said. Another 3.9 percent are malnourished and 3.7 percent severely malnourished. "The report suggests a need for a supplementary and therapeutic feeding centre in the town," WFP said. Meanwhile food is urgently needed for some of the 38,691 IDPs in 29 villages around Mile 91, which is 146 km east of Freetown. WFP said an assessment carried out in Yonibana, one of the villages, indicated that most IDPs were surviving on cassava leaves and palm oil. For most IDPs, it said, this was the second or third displacement in the last two years. WFP said it planned to start distributing food this week to the IDPs and 5,000 host families. WFP food is being distributed to 35,837 IDPs in Kaffu Bullom and Loko Masama chiefdoms, northeast of Freetown, and also to 39,579 IDPs in camps in the capital. In the week prior to its 25 August emergency report, WFP distributed 1,389 mt of food to 42,349 people in various parts of Sierra Leone. The agency said it had 7,689 mt of food stocked in the country.