About a week before Americans and friends would gather to celebrate Thanksgiving, a convoy of trucks rolled to a stop in the war-ravaged Tigray region of Ethiopia. Humanitarian workers began to unload hundreds of tons of food. Fighting and instability had made the work dangerous, but now sacks heavy with wheat and split peas and vast containers of vegetable oil were being sorted and sent directly to the region’s hungry.
The United Nations’ World Food Programme, the largest humanitarian organization on the planet, had organized the effort. Estimates suggest the deliveries would help 67,000 people.
Trucks filled with food aid queue outside a warehouse in Gode, Ethiopia, for unloading. (WFP)
It was a significant achievement against hunger, yet David Beasley, an American from South Carolina and the agency’s executive director since 2017, finds it hard to take comfort from one success as he thinks of how many more people still need help.
At the end of 2022, the WFP is on track to provide food, medicine and support to 153 million people in at least 80 countries, many of them dealing with war and famine. That’s the most people in the program’s 60-year history.
“When I took over, my goal was, ‘What can I do to make the World Food Programme no longer needed?’” Beasley told ShareAmerica in phone interview from the agency’s headquarters in Rome. “We still have a lot of work to do.”
The World Food Programme’s executive director, David Beasley, talks to a young boy at the Imvepi Refugee Settlement in Uganda. (WFP)
The WFP has grown under Beasley’s watch to become a $10 billion annual effort with more than 22,000 staffers…