U.N.'s World Food Program Cried Poverty While Sitting on Cash Stockpile of More Than $1.22 Billion

Fox News

Just weeks before it announced the onset of a global food crisis and the urgent need for donors to provide at least $775 million in additional funding, the World Food Program (WFP) was sitting on a cash and near-cash stockpile of more than $1.22 billion.

The startling figure is contained in the latest audited statements of the WFP, which were endorsed by WFP’s executive director, Josette Sheeran, on March 31, 2008 — just a month before Sheeran announced at an international aid conference on April 22 that a “silent tsunami” in rising food prices demanded the huge infusion of cash for WFP’s latest budget.

In an op-ed article published in the International Herald Tribune on May 1, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon further declared that the WFP had just “$18 million cash in hand” in the wake of its appeal for emergency funding.

The audited statements are due to be presented to the annual Rome meeting of WFP’s supervisory executive board in June.

The $1.22 billion figure, tallied as of December 31, 2007, represents an increase of nearly $400 million over the WFP’s cash reserves a year earlier, as laid out in a report to the WFP’s governing executive board in June 2007.

The cash stockpile was in addition to pledges for an additional $1.33 billion, all of which left the organization with more than $2 billion in anticipated cash and reserves just before it made its most recent urgent appeal.

In all, the auditors declared, WFP had added an additional $91 million in cash assets over the 12-month period, leaving the U.N.’s emergency food supplier with roughly the same reserve assets it held in 2005.

Asked a series of questions about the reserves by email yesterday, WFP had not replied by the time this story was published.

Ever since WFP first announced the looming crisis of food aid for the world’s poorest people — based largely on dramatic international hikes in food costs — the World Food Program and other United Nations spokesmen, including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, have been steadily ratcheting up the tab required to top off WFP’s budget to meet 2008 needs.

Initially, Sheeran announced that some $500 million was needed, though she added that would not fully fund such things as school food programs for some 20 million hungry youngsters. By the time of the aid conference, attended largely by U.N. agencies and World Bank representatives, the needed funding had risen to $775 million.

By the time the conference ended, Secretary General Ban put the shortfall at roughly $1 billion.

Ban also announced that a U.N. task force dealing with the food crisis would need as much as $1.6 billion in additional funding for seed programs and other means of expanding the global food supply.

On Thursday, President George W. Bush called on Congress to add $770 million in new international food aid to some $350 million in new aid he announced after WFP announced the “silent tsunami” crisis.