WFP appeals for donations for Liberia as first food ship arrives

The UN World Food Programme appealed on Tuesday for urgent food donations to prevent half a million Liberians going hungry as its first food ship arrived in the port of Monrovia since fighting died down in the capital earlier this month. WFP spokesman Ramine Rafirasme said there was probably enough food in the pipeline to keep Liberians fed until the end of this year, but the organisation urgently needed donors to commit more food now to prevent shortages developing in January. "If what we are negotiating comes through, then I think up to December we are okay, but if we do not get any more contributions, then after January people will go hungry," he told IRIN, stressing that it took four to six months to convert donor pledges of assistance into actual food deliveries. Rafirasme was speaking as a WFP ship docked in Monrovia bringing 2,300 tonnes of assorted food supplies from Freetown in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Its cargo includes pulses, corn soya blend, vegetable oil, bulgur wheat and high energy biscuits. The WFP reckons it will need to ship 9,000 tonnes of food per month into Liberia to feed an estimated 500,000 people displaced from their homes by 14 years of civil war, most of whom are concentrated in and around Monrovia. Rafirasme said that would mean shipping 45,000 tonnes of food into Monrovia's rundown port by the year end. Such a task would not be easy given the fact that the port's cranes and fork-lift trucks had disappeared, wrecked and looted containers littered the quayside and wrecked cargo ships lay on the sea floor blocking two of the berths, he added. Another bottleneck facing WFP is a lack of trucks to carry food from the port to distribution centres. Rafirasme said the organisation's entire fleet of about 20 trucks was looted during the rebel assault on Monrovia in June and July and none had been recovered so far. The situation had been partially alleviated by the dispatch of eight small trucks from Sweden in planes that landed in Monrovia last Thursday. But Rafirasme noted that these could only carry five or six tonnes each, compared to a payload of 20 tonnes on the larger trucks which WFP normally uses. "That's not enough to cover our needs," he said by telephone from the Senegalese capital Dakar. Despite these difficulties, and the extensive looting of food stocks from warehouses in the port of Monrovia, Rafirasme said WFP and its partner relief agencies had managed to distribute food to 80,000 people in the city over the past week. The organisation's main problem in meeting a still undetermined requirement for food aid in rebel-held areas of the interior was security, he stressed. "The main problem we are having in Liberia is security," Rafirasme said. "We cannot ship food or send trucks to areas outside Monrovia without security guarantees." "Security and food distribution go hand in hand," he stressed, noting that in the past WFP had distributed food to displaced people in camps on the outskirts of Monrovia, only to see it stolen by gunmen shortly afterwards. To be able to work safely in the interior, WFP would need several thousand more peacekeeping troops on the ground, the WFP spokesman said. At present a vanguard force of just 1,500 Nigerian troops is struggling to maintain security in Monrovia, where heavily armed government and rebel fighters still cruise around openly in pickup trucks. As reports flooded in of continuing clashes between government forces and two rebel movements just over 100 km north of the capital, Rafirasme remarked: "We don't see a quick fix for Liberia...we will work hard, but we need help and we need it fast as well."