World Food Program: Crisis…What Crisis?

Audit Reveals U.N.’s World Food Program Has More Than $1.22 Billion Stockpile

This Week’s Top Scrooge - May 2, 2008

By ALEXANDER

It’s been a while since I’ve published a This Week’s Top Scrooge, so I decided to resurrect the column upon hearing about yet, another World Food Program snafu.

Whether or not the WFP could use more money or not, it seems awfully suspect that the group’s tactics for fishing-in cash are sketchy at best.

This from FoxNews:

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. (more)

It’s hard to comprehend what it really takes to fuel such an ambitious group as the WFP. It seems corruption would be the last thing a humanitarian effort needs. Yet, the WFP is not immune to the corrupt world it tries to maneuver within.

We haven’t heard WFP’s side yet, but I suspect the spin doctors are working overtime. For calling out a “silent tsunami” while keeping quiet about its own monster funds, the WFP is This Week’s Top Scrooge.

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