While food aid is a tried and tested model, proudly woven into ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳history, it sprang from a largely unidirectional, top-down vision: people were hungry; we fed them. Food assistance, by contrast, involves a more complex understanding of people¡¯s long-term nutritional needs and of the diverse approaches required to meet them. This conceptual shift has been at the core of WFP¡¯s transformation in recent years. While we remain the world¡¯s leading humanitarian agency, we have evolved to combine frontline action with the quest for durable solutions.
This shift is about recognizing that hunger does not occur in a vacuum. It means we must concentrate time, resources and efforts on the most vulnerable in society. It implies not just emergency interventions, but tailored, multi-year support programmes designed to lift a whole nation¡¯s nutritional indicators. We balance the urgency to alleviate hunger here and now with the broader objective of ending hunger once and for all.
Food assistance thus becomes part of a policy mix that advances social wellbeing in general. In line with the , and in particular with , we consider the quality as well as the quantity of food, with the emphasis on its nutritious character and seasonality. Crucially, food assistance enlists beneficiaries as actors: it gives them a voice, and, wherever possible, a choice in what food they receive and how they receive it.
This last principle has been steadily gaining prominence. And it helps explain why over the last decade, in-kind food assistance (the only type there was until the mid-2000s) has partly given way to cash-based transfers.
¡°Cash¡± for ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳involves physical bank notes, vouchers, or electronic funds being given to beneficiaries to spend directly. Empowering people to meet their essential needs is a long-haul process. Cash now represents over a third of ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳assistance, with an estimated US$2.8 billion transferred in 2023. With its benefits of flexibility, efficiency and beneficiary choice, cash is growing rapidly within our hunger-fighting portfolio. In fact, both cash and in-kind are likely to co-exist for the foreseeable future, with ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳increasingly adept at using them singly, alternately or jointly in any given setting.
