WASHINGTON, Feb 25: The United States and at least 10 other countries are crafting a plan to feed millions of Iraqis in case a war is launched against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, US officials said on Monday.

The contingency plans have been developed over the past five months and would include providing ready-to-eat meals to Iraqi civilians, delivered by US soldiers, during any war.

That would be followed up with the restoration of an existing food coupon programme giving families access to basic commodities, Elliott Abrams, a National Security Council official, told reporters.

Currently, about 60 per cent of Iraq’s 24 million people rely upon food coupons, overseen by a United Nations programme, for their nutritional needs, including grains, cooking oils, and sugar.

The UN programme allows Iraq’s oil revenues to be used to buy food and medicine for its citizens. But if a US-led attack on Iraq were launched, that programme likely would be interrupted. About $2.6 billion in oil revenues per year is being used by Iraq to buy food under the UN programme.

“We will make an effort to get that system up and running. If there is a conflict, we want to disrupt that system as little as possible and get it back as soon as possible,” Abrams said.

Andrew Natsios, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, said he has talked to counterparts in 10 foreign countries about contributing food aid. He refused to name the countries, saying, “They want to make their own announcements” of potential Iraqi food aid.

Natsios said AID already has spent $26.5 million to buy commodities that have been pre-positioned in the Gulf region and another $52 million was now being spent. A spokeswoman later clarified that the amount actually being spent was $56 million.

But last week, a World Food Programme spokesman said a war could leave at least 10 million Iraqis short of food and providing aid could cost “hundreds of millions of dollars”.

While Natsios boasted that US officials never before had five months to plan for a wide-scale humanitarian disaster, he and other US officials acknowledged it was not possible to know the scope of food shortages until any war plays out.

That will depend, Abrams warned, on whether the Iraqi leaders authorize the use of weapons of mass destruction, whether Iraqi oil facilities are destroyed and whether the Iraqi regime fosters ethnic violence.

Before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the United States sold significant amounts of food to Baghdad, much of it with US government assistance.

According to a US industry source, the United States sold 650,000 tons of corn to Iraq in 1989-90, 1.3 million tons of wheat, mostly hard red winter wheat, and 250,000 tons of rice. Australia and Canada were other major suppliers of grains.

A food aid crisis in Iraq could come as global relief organizations already are finding it difficult to feed up to 40 million Africans facing severe hunger.

But Natsios said African food aid would not be diminished by any crisis in Iraq.

With war possibly imminent, the impact of US food aid was the topic of speculation in commodity markets on Monday.

For example, there was talk among market players that Cargill was taking delivery to position itself to supply sugar to the US government in case of war in Iraq.

A spokesman for Cargill said he could not immediately comment.

One US sugar industry official, however, speculated that Europe would be a more likely supplier of cheap sugar now that the US government has liquidated its sugar stocks.—Reuters