UN News Center
Dec 16 2004
Lack of funds forces UN agency to halt food aid to 140,000
Azerbaijanis in need
16 December 2004 – Food distribution for 140,000 Azerbaijanis
displaced by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia a decade ago
will come to a complete halt next month because of a $10 million
shortfall in aid sought for the three-year operation by the United
Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
“We have tried everything, even halving the rations last month, but
we just don’t have enough food stocks left to go around,” WFP Country
Director Rahman Chowdhury said. “Most of the displaced are so poor
they don’t have the means to buy food. It’s a dreadful situation,
especially in winter, when temperatures drop to minus 20 degrees
celsius.”
Three quarters of those affected are women and children, a large
number of them still living in makeshift shelters like railway cars
and dugouts. Only WFP ‘s school feeding programme that supplies food
to 5,300 primary school children will continue, but on a limited
scale.
One essential ingredient of the take-home rations, which are being
provided to the youngsters five days a week, is vitamin-fortified
wheat soya blend, whose stocks will also run out in January, Mr.
Chowdhury said.
WFP sought $21 million for the operation, which started in January
2003. Since 1994, the agency has been pivotal in assisting hundreds
of thousands of Azerbaijanis displaced by the conflict in which more
than 600,000 people fled from Nagorno-Karabakh the region, now
occupied by Armenia, to other parts of Azerbaijan.
Most of the displaced live in remote areas of western Azerbaijan,
such as Agjabedi and Imishli regions, where employment possibilities
are extremely limited.