WFP launches new air route via Libya to step up Darfur food deliveries

KHARTOUM, Sudan, May 7, 2005 (AP) — The first flight taking food from Libya directly into war-plagued Darfur in western Sudan took place Saturday as the U.N.’s food agency launched a campaign to reach nearly 2 million people during the rainy season that starts late June.

A UN cargo plane drops humanitarian aid packages on a prefixed site miles away from the western town of El-Geneina, close to the border with Chad. WFP started airdrop operations over Darfur on August 1 after heavy rains and insecurity risked cutting off camps harbouring tens of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs). (WFP) .

An Ilyushin-76 aircraft landed in the South Darfur state capital of Nyala from al-Kufra in southeast Libya carrying 30 metric tons of cereals, the World Food Programme said in a statement.

The WFP hopes to deliver 5,000 metric tons monthly via the new air corridor.

“The extra capacity using the al-Kufra airlift will be a tremendous help during the approaching rainy season and concurrent period of greatest food shortages,” WFP’s Sudan representative Ramiro Lopes da Silva said.

“We are looking at a worst-case scenario of more than three million people needing food assistance in Darfur from August.”

The airlifts will be vital during the rainy season, a three-month period when Darfur roads become impassable and food needs from the millions displaced by the 2-year-old conflict peak.

The flight path follows last year’s opening of an ancient caravan route overland for convoys of WFP food aid to travel from Libya to refugee camps in Chad, the statement said.

The statement said WFP has received US$286 million (A?223 million) of US$467 million (A?364 million) it needs to feed an average of 2.3 million people monthly in Darfur this year, resulting in a 39 percent shortfall.

Darfur is the scene of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. An estimated 180,000 people have died in the upheaval — many from hunger and disease — and about 2 million others have been displaced since the conflict began in February 2003.

It erupted when rebels took up arms against what they saw as years of state neglect and discrimination against Sudanese of African origin. The government is accused of responding with a counterinsurgency campaign in which the Arab Janjaweed militia committed wide-scale abuses against the African population.