Funding shortages mean WFP will stop food aid to nearly 1 million Nepalese

May 20 2011

On Wednesday, the World Food Program (WFP) said "it does not have enough funds to continue flying supplies by helicopter to western Nepal, where road access is patchy and around a million people rely on U.N. food aid," Agence France-Presse reports. According to the WFP, an estimated 41 percent of people in Nepal are undernourished.

"Globally, WFP is going through funding constraints, and the world's attention in terms of assistance is shifting away from Nepal to other areas such as Japan and the Middle East," WFP spokesperson Christina Hobbs said (5/18). When the helicopter operations stop, the WFP will only be able to provide food for 100,000 people in the west of Nepal, the BBC writes in a story examining the country's "malnutrition crisis" (Jolly, 5/17).