Food Factor Podcast | WFP World Food Programme

The term resilience has entered the aid lexicon. But is it just “new wine in old bottles”? Haven’t aid agencies already been seeking to build resilience among beneficiaries for decades?  To find out, we spoke to David Gressly, who was appointed Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for Sahel earlier this year.

There are just under 870 million hungry people in the world, according to a new hunger report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agriculutural Development. The report highlights programmes called "safety nets" as an important means of bringing that number down. In this episode, WFP Chief Economist Lynn Brown discusses some of the main conclusions in the report, such as how safety nets can lift people up by catching them when they fall.

Drought and conflict are a recipe for disaster in a country like Mali where hunger and malnutrition indicators are high even in the best of times. In this episode, we talk with WFP Country Director Nancy Walters who is leading a complex emergency operation to deliver food to people affected by the crisis.

Food prices are on the rise from Chad to Burkina Faso as drought in the Sahel region of Africa takes its toll on local food markets. In the latest episode of the Food Factor Podcast, WFP Market Analyst Jean-Martin Bauer tells us how the situation is evolving and what makes it different from previous crises in the Sahel.

In the emergency response business, time and information are king. Any tool that give aid workers more time to make decisions and more accurate information to base them will save lives. In this episode, WFP Deputy Chief of Emergency Preparedness and Response Etienne Labande talks about a new software package called the “Early Warning Tool” which does exactly that.    

In this episode, Philippe Martou, joins us from Baghdad where he is the Head of the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) in Iraq. Martou talks about the challenges involved with setting up and running this operation, and also gives us a glimpse into what it’s like to live and work for WFP in Baghdad.

Jean-Pierre Demargerie, WFP Country Director in Cambodia, discusses the emergency operation to feed some 150,000 people hit by the worst bout of flooding the southeast Asian nation has seen in over a decade. According to Demargerie, reaching people in the flood zone has required some creative solutions, such as a "floating food distribution" carried out entirely on boats.

Former CEO of TNT, Peter Bakker, explains why the Dutch logistics giant has thrown its weight behind the fight against hunger. Bakker explains what big companies bring to the table and why a commitment to solving the world’s problems has become an essential part of doing business.

In this episode, WFP Public Information Officer David Orr joins us from Mogadishu where thousands of people are arriving from famine-plagued southern Somalia. Orr talks about the challenges faced by aid workers as they struggle to assist mounting numbers of hungry in a city gripped by years of conflict.

In this episode, we speak with influential nutritionist Patrick Webb about the nutritional advances in food aid over the past 50 years and how they've changed the way we think about hunger. While there may be no silver bullet in the fight against malnutrition, Webb says our growing arsenal of tools and understanding has brought us a long way.

How does it work exactly when a food aid agency gives people cash instead of food? And what about vouchers? WFP's Annalisa Conte answers these questions and more, explaining why WFP is planning to use these options more in the future and in what circumstances they are a valid tool.

Mobile phones, tablets and other mobile devices are making it easier than ever to gather reliable information from the field and process it quickly. George Mu'ammar, from WFP’s Vulnerability Assessment Unit, talks about the gadgets WFP is using and how they’re changing the work of food security analysts.