Wfp Quotes

Kesteven confided to us that he had heard whispers that Nazir Ahmed, a Pakistani who was the head of the WFP for this region, wanted the aid to go to Pakistan. Nazir Ahmed had copied our entire proposal and sent it to the Ambassador of Pakistan in Rome, advising him to simply substitute the names of cities – change Bombay to Lahore, Calcutta to Karachi and so on – and submit it as Pakistan’s proposal to the WFP. I was aware that Nazir Ahmed was deeply prejudiced against the Indian government. I remember that he had once asked me how a Christian like me could be designated Chairman of NDDB. I had replied: ‘Mr Ahmed, that is because India is not Pakistan. When your country attacked India, the Collector of Kutch district was a Christian, the IGP in Gujarat was a devout Muslim, the Home Secretary of Gujarat was a Christian and the Governor of Gujarat was a Muslim. That is India for you.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), which compared ‘food versus cash’ in four countries, found that in three of the four – Ecuador, Uganda and Yemen (before the civil war) – cash transfers led to better nutrition at lower cost, meaning many more people could be helped for the same outlay. (In the fourth, Niger, severe seasonal food shortages meant that in-kind deliveries improved dietary diversity more than cash.)54 This has led the WFP to put more emphasis on cash transfers; today, just over a quarter of WFP’s aid globally is cash-based.