The Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley yesterday said the agency is feeding about 1.1million persons, who have been displaced by Boko Haram insurgency.
He said the agency has been managing its programme in the country with about $200million.
He praised the United States, the United Kingdom (UK), the European Union (EU), Germany and Japan for contributing significantly to the WFP activities for the IDPs.
But he said WFP was running out of funds because 80 per cent of its expenditure had been for war zones.
He said most of the Internally Displaced Persons were eager to return home.
He said the IDPs were already bored in these camps and they ought to be kept busy.
Beasley, who spoke with our correspondents after returning from a trip to IDPs camps in Borno State, said the International Community needed to cooperate with the Federal Government to provide a safe and secure environment in the North-East so that life can go back to normal
He said: “We are feeding about 1.1m monthly for example and that is in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. We have about 1.9m IDPs in Nigeria; we have about 1.7 million in one of those camps in one state out of the three states.
“For instance we went from feeding 85,000 people a year ago to 1.1 million in just a year. That is a major scale.
“We provide them with food they need, from rice to different nutritional products, we give the balanced nutritional diets they need. We make certain the children are healthy, not stunted and we are very pleased with the cooperation we are getting and the success we are having in each of the camps we are responsible for and the population we are responsible for.
“It depends on the situation, for example, we give the children special supplements, it’s a special cereal fortified with necessary vitamins and nutritional values. We also give them rice, beans, vegetable oil, soy but 70 per cent of the food we supply our beneficiaries are sourced locally
Asked how the WFP was getting funds, he said through donors including some countries.
“We are getting donors by the day. The good news is that the international community has been stepping it up.
“We have a little more than $200m with the United States (US), a major supporter contributing a chunk of that with over $150m.
“We get funds in but it’s a complex situation when we talk about funding because it doesn’t matter what you need, what matters is what you need coming through. The United Kingdom (UK), European Union (EU), Germany and Japan have all been doing well too.
“It doesn’t matter whether it is Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia, Syria or South Sudan, Yemen or Iraq, 80 per cent of our expenditure is for war zones and we are running out of funds.”
Speaking on his interaction with IDPs, he said they all wanted to return home.
Beasley added: “I talked to many of the mothers and fathers, and I asked them, are you getting sufficient food and they answered we are getting pretty good, that is good news. The bad news is they are in camps, with thousands of people in a limited space.
“The best I guess, given the condition is, who wants to live in a camp? They want to go back home. But the good news is they are safe and getting through, the bad news is it is a camp with a lot of people. It is not a prison but it is not where you want to be.”
