WFP committed to helping Liberian children - Morris

The Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), James Morris, pledged on Saturday WFP's commitment to help at least 350,000 Liberian children get back to school and to assist Liberia in the disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration and resettlement of combatants. Morris, who was in Liberia for a one-day visit, called on the international community to give stronger, focused support to the peace process in the western African country which has been destroyed by 14 years of civil war. "The work in Liberia is very important to the UN and WFP. We are feeding close to 500,000 people and we aspire to feed at least 350,000 children and get them back to come to school, especially the girls," Morris told reporters in the capital, Monrovia. "We hope to help with the resettlement of refugees and are focused on efforts to get them back into regular society. We'll help with their disarmament and reintegration," Morris said. Warning that war does terrible things to children, Morris said: "We have to protect the children. I am optimistic, and I think that good days are ahead." The chairman of Liberia's National transition government, Gyude Bryant, told Morris that 70 percent of combatants in Liberia's conflict were children under the age of 18. He sought assistance from the world body to deal with the returnee population and to pay arrears for teachers, suggesting that WFP could initiate a food-for-work payment system to help pay the teachers in the short term. Bryant also sought help in the health sector, infrastructure and water and sanitation. Currently WFP provides hot meals for children in schools in Monrovia and neighbouring counties. The teachers share the meal. Bryant decried the impact of UN sanctions on the country's timber and minerals, saying the sanctions were hurting the economy. Morris described Bryant as a smart man with a lot of enthusiasm and energy. "I think the leadership is focused on the right issues and I think the UN Country team is focused on working as a team and a partnership," he said. Bryant was sworn into office on 14 October following a peace deal signed in Accra in August. The agreement paved way for the creation of a transitional government in which Bryant, a businessman, was chosen to lead the country to the 2005 elections. "Liberia is a country that is rich in resources and has a climate that should be very conducive to agriculture. We are going to be very focused on food for work programmes, food for asset creation, food for education," Morris said. "The international community has responded positively in providing all we've asked for this year and we're off to a good start for next year, but we still would like to ask the world to help Liberia in maintaining the peace and re-energising the economy," he added. WFP had asked donors for US $75 million to support Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, saying that given the way refugees and displaced people move back and forth between the countries it makes sense to approach the situation from a regional context. Morris told Bryant to address the HIV/AIDS problem, saying the pandemic has grave consequences on all sectors, including agriculture, food security, human resource and general infrastructure. "Today it is estimated that there are 14 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa because mum or dad died of HIV/AIDS. The estimate is that the number will reach 20 million by 2010," he said. "It is important for Liberia to be thoughtful about these issues," Morris said. He said this was one of the reasons that WFP felt that school-feeding was so important. Through school, he said, the children would get education on important issues in life. According to WFP, food assistance to Liberia is vital to the establishment of stability in Liberia - one of the world's poorest countries that is not even listed in the United Nations Development Programmes Human Development Index. The deployment over the coming weeks of thousands more UN peacekeepers (UNMIL) would open up parts of the country that WFP has not been able to reach for months, WFP said. It estimated that it would need about 70,000 tonnes of foods to feed up to 430,000 people in the country in 2004.