Food supply to tens of thousands of refugees set to improve - UN officials

A food crisis facing at least 400,000 Burundian and Congolese refugees in Tanzania is set to improve next week due to an increased supply of maize and pulses, UN officials said on Tuesday. "After receiving some donations, WFP [UN World Food Programme] managed to purchase 12,879 mt of maize and pulses locally," Karla Hershey, the procurement officer for the WFP office in Tanzania, told IRIN. She said the donations came from Britain (US $5.7 million), the Netherlands ($1.2 million) and Switzerland ($530,000). Food insecurity has hampered the refugees since September 2004 and the situation worsened at year's end. The spokeswoman for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Mia Bulow-Olsen, said food rations to refugees had been reduced from 2,100 kilocalories to less than 1,400 kilocalories a day per person. Hershey said from 14 March, rations for refugees would be raised to 87 percent of their requirement. However, she said there was still a shortage in the supply of vegetable oil, salt and micronutrient supplements. She said there was a shortfall of 1,500 mt of vegetable oil, 1,225 mt of salt and 4,140 mt of micronutrient food supplements.