U.S. boosts food aid to Cote d?Ivoire refugees

U.S. boosts food aid to Cote dÆIvoire refugees    The U.S. Agency for International Development will provide additional food aid to Liberia for refugees who have fled post-election violence in Cote d’Ivoire.
   Soon after the violence broke out, USAID’s Office of Food for Peace authorized the use of food commodities already in Liberia for emergency food assistance for the first Ivorian refugees who crossed the border.
   USAID will now provide an additional $3 million to the World Food Program to help feed more than 30,000 refugees already in Liberia. The additional funding will provide an estimated 2,100 tons of food aid to help meet the needs of new refugees.
   Some of the commodities heading to Liberia will come from USAID’s global supply chain system under which the agency rotates 100,000 tons of food aid commodities through six prepositioning sites around the world. When food aid is needed — whether for a continuing emergency or a new crisis — USAID uses commodities from the prepositioning sites, and then refills the sites with new orders. By instituting this system on a large, global scale, the agency can supply food aid quickly.
   USAID responds to global food insecurity by providing both emergency food assistance to help people affected by conflicts and natural disasters and longer-term development food assistance to address the underlying causes of hunger.
   In fiscal year 2010, USAID’s Office of Food for Peace provided over $2.1 billion in food assistance, including about 2.1 million tons of Title II food aid as part of programs valued at $1.9 billion in 48 countries, as well as $244 million in grants in 17 countries for local and regional procurement of food commodities, food vouchers and cash transfers under the new Emergency Food Security Program.