WFP working to alleviate food problems

WFP has said it is doing its best to alleviate the food problems in northern Karuzi province, after the medical NGO Medecins sans frontieres (MSF) warned that the number of severely malnourished children admitted to its therapeutic feeding centres had doubled and the situation was worsening daily. In a press release on Friday, it urged WFP to improve the food supply pipelines to Burundi to enable a general food distribution to malnourished people in the north of the country. “We are working night and day to get this done,” a WFP spokeswoman told IRIN on Monday. She said WFP was still facing problems in the transport of food rations from the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam to Burundi, but it hoped to distribute 10,000 mt of rations a month to Burundi until the next harvest which is due to begin in April/May. The plan would target 470,000 people countrywide. “We are in complete agreement with MSF, we are doing our best to help alleviate the situation as soon as possible,” she added. She pointed out the malnutrition crisis in Burundi stemmed from a number of problems: successive bad harvests but also the current malaria epidemic. Some 90 percent of children in therapeutic centres have malaria.