LONDON: The UN’s biggest humanitarian aid agencies, which house and feed over 100 million people, are facing a deep – and potentially long-term – crisis of funding as governments across the globe slash their aid budgets.

Despite cutting over $1 billion from its budget for the next year, largely through savings in the cost of fuel, the World Food Programme recently revealed that it would struggle to meet its commitments to feed 49 million people in 12 of the world’s most hunger-stricken countries and was already planning to cut rations, including to Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.

The WFP requested $5.2bn from international donors for 2009, but has so far managed to raise barely $500m in guaranteed pledges, with $450m tied to the crisis in Darfur, leading to warnings that warehouses for some of its most critical operations could run out of food.

“Globally, hunger is on a march,” said the organisation’s executive director, Josette Sheeran, on a recent visit to India.

“The food crisis itself has hit the world harder than I would have ever expected,” she added. “We expect the financial crisis will add to the pressure on the world’s most vulnerable.”

If remaining pledges were received tomorrow, officials at the organisation say it would take three months to process the cash into deliverable food aid, leaving the organisation facing a severe shortfall next year.

Without a rapid injection of funds, the organisation adds, life-saving food assistance operations will come under threat in the new year in Bangladesh, Chad, Haiti, Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Food aid operations in Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia could also be jeopardised without new funding.

A long period of high food prices that have yet to drop in many local markets has been combined with the effects of the global downturn on developing economies.

Sheeran pointed out that one per cent of the money being used to fund financial bailouts in Europe and the US could entirely fund the WFP’s operations.—Dawn/Guardian News & Media