Systemwatch: an occasional series on individual members of the United Nations family.

In spite of today's technological advances and economic growth, hundreds of millions of people are hungry and suffer from malnutrition - most of them women and children in third world countries. The lack of sufficient food will have a devastating impact on future generations in many parts of the world. Catherine Bertini, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), talked to Michael Littlejohns of the United Nations television programme World Chronicle about this problem. Joining in the conversation were Thalif Deen of Inter Press Service and Barbara Crossette of The New York Times.

Littlejohns: Tell us about WFP. How do you operate?

Bertini: WFP is the UN's front-line agency fighting hunger. It has probably the largest budget of any single agency in the system. We accept food donations, mostly from Governments, and we do assessments of the needs in the poorest countries of the world, of the poorest people, of people living amidst conflict, and of refugees. Then we provide food assistance based on totally voluntary contributions.

Littlejohns: You give the food away, or are you able to sell some of it?

Bertini: We do a lot of things with it. People in the midst of conflict receive food aid in order to keep them alive. We use food to help people grow, to reach people at critical times in their lives when food is very important - for pregnant women, for instance, for children under five. That is food that is distributed directly to the individuals, perhaps through a school feeding programme or health centres. But then we also use food for work, where we pay people with food rather than with cash, to build something constructive in their community that they themselves have decided would be helpful for the long-term economic benefit of their community. Occasionally, we sell some of the food in order to provide some other implements, but it is a very tiny percentage of our food aid.

Deen: I believe during the last few years your agency has been spending over 70 per cent of its resources on disaster relief. How does this affect your development objectives?

Bertini: The world community is very generous when it comes to individuals who need food in order to live. But the development part of our work is not as easy to describe, and seeing a difference that development food aid makes - for instance, in helping a farmer in Colombia to build an irrigation canal and have him become 10 times as productive as he was before, or helping a Bangladeshi woman to be able to learn a skill, so she can then bring in much more income and more pride and more support to her family - these are not things that are so easy to describe, and therefore our development portfolio is just not as big as it has been in the past.

Crossette: In the development portfolio, are you asking for help other than food aid in terms of the equipment or know-how, or other things to help people develop their own agricultural skills?

Bertini: Yes, we essentially purchase technical expertise either in an individual country or from another UN agency, and then we use that to help assist a community. For instance, a community may decide that it wants to develop fish farming, and so we would help recruit and pay for an expert to show them how to do it, and not only how to get into the technical nature of growing fish, raising fish, but also about how to market it. And then the community may very well use the proceeds to go into another economic endeavour that is supportive of the people.

Littlejohns: How do you avoid the situation where perhaps your food supplies end up on the black market and, instead of helping poor people, are being sold at a profit?

Bertini: We have an extensive network of monitors, so that we know what food goes on the ship to begin with, and what food comes off it; what food goes on the trucks or the trains, what food comes off it; what food is distributed, and then spot checks of the food as it is distributed. Once we hear that there is any potential problem at all, we immediately look into it. And I can tell you it is a very tiny minority. We also have the new facility of an inspector-general. For instance, one of our country directors said that there was some food leaking, but he could not find out where. Our inspector-general went unannounced to this country, went to the market, saw the food, went immediately to the minister in the Government, got his support, went to the police, surrounded the market, and had all the people arrested, and then found the place where the food was leaking. We have had a lot of success with this approach.

Deen: Are there any food aid recipients who have progressed to a point where they have now become food donors?

Bertini: Yes. There are many countries that are now donors who used to be food aid recipients - South Korea, for instance, and Hungary and Singapore. We have countries that are graduating from the need for food aid, graduating from the need for development food aid. This does not mean that countries no longer have any hungry people, but there comes a point where the country may have enough of its own resources, so that it is the country's responsibility and not the international community's responsibility to feed the hungry people in that country. We have now about 20 countries out of the 90 - in which we are currently involved - that are actually going to graduate within the next year and a half.

Crossette: In your own agency, are you looking always at the future of food production? And are there any concerns on the horizon that you see which might affect the way the world can feed itself or the way your agency can accumulate food?

Bertini: There are now 800 million hungry people in the world. That number has actually decreased over time. The World Bank projects that by 2005 there will be about 600 million hungry people. But the fact is that there are still going to be many hungry people while production is going to increase. This means that people are going to be even more desperately poor and there is going to be an even greater need for food aid to help them bridge the gap. Some recent research suggests that in the same year, 2005, we would need three times as much food aid as we have now.

Littlejohns: Carol Bellamy, the head of UNICEF, said that 4,500 children under the age of five are dying every month of hunger and disease, because Iraq is unable to obtain food and medicines for them. Tell us how serious the problem is in Iraq?

Bertini: The problem is very serious in Iraq. We are trying to serve over 2 million people with food assistance. What we are seeing now is that the problem becomes worse and worse. It used to be that there was general food distribution in the country, and we hope that if there is an agreement on the food-for-oil programme, there will be general food distribution.

Crossette: When you meet reluctant donors who say, "Why should we be supporting these people when the rulers have the money and they are building palaces?", what is the explanation you can make for why this is so important?

Bertini: If people are hungry, I don't think we can put up other reasons why the international community does not provide assistance to those who are hungry. If we only sent food to those places where the person in charge was a wonderful man or woman, then there would be an awful lot more hungry people. From the United Nations perspective, and from any humanitarian perspective, we have to send food where people are hungry. And that means sometimes it is a place that is politically unpopular.

Deen: The UN system has three agencies dealing with food and agriculture - the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and WFP There are accusations that there is too much duplication and there is no coordination amongst these three agencies. What is your response to this?

Bertini: We all have food in our name. That does not mean that we overlap. WFP is the agency that provides food assistance to needy people, and neither of the other agencies do that. FAO provides technical experts, and IFAD is almost like a mini-World Bank, to help with loans for small agricultural development. There is a wonderful way that we can work together. For instance, we can provide food assistance to a woman who is taking out loans so that she can develop a business on her own; she needs some food assistance to carry her through the training and the beginning of her business. And with FAO, we hire them on a regular basis to provide technical assistance to our work.

Deen: Do you have any relationship to the rising population and what steps would you take to help them?

Bertini: Certainly we work in coordination with all of the UN programmes. We may, for instance, share a project within a health centre where food is used as an incentive for women to come there. Here, the woman would get various kinds of information about family planning, her own health or any other issues that are important to her. Nonetheless, no matter how many people there are in the world, it is our job to try to do our best to reach those who are hungry and poor, and to help people help themselves so that they are no longer, in future generations, hungry and poor.

Crossette: Has giving the food to women in the family been successful?

Bertini: We have made this a major part of our programmes. Women are the ones in every society who gather the food, and prepare and serve it. And so, therefore, it makes sense, wherever possible, for us to direct food to women.