U.N. faces "heartbreaking" food aid choices

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GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations food agency will need to make "heartbreaking" choices about its emergency aid unless governments donate more money to help it buy increasingly expensive food, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Programme (WFP),which aims to feed 73 million people in 80 countries this year,said sharp rises in the price of wheat, corn and other staplesmeant many people "already living on the razor's edge" may loseaccess to critical food aid.

The WFP has received just $14 million (7 million pounds)after appealing to governments for an extra $500 million tocope with higher food prices, linked by economists to highenergy prices, more demand from developing countries and theuse of farmlands for biofuels.

The supplemental appeal was meant as a top-up to the WFP'sinitial budget of $2.9 billion for 2008, of which donors haveprovided about $800 million to date, Berthiaume said.

"If by this summer we don't receive more, we will have tomake quite heartbreaking choices -- either we reduce thebeneficiaries or we reduce the rations," she told a newsbriefing in Geneva.

Some governments have indicated they will provide funds butthe money has not yet been transferred, she said.

"Hunger is taking a different image now," she said,contrasting the current crisis to those where wars or naturaldisasters destroyed food stocks. "There will be food in themarkets, and people will not have the means to buy it."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in New York onMonday that rapidly worsening food shortages around the worldhad reached "emergency proportions".

Short-term emergency measures are needed to meet urgentneeds and avert starvation in many regions, as well as asignificant increase in long-term productivity in food grainproduction, according to Ban.

(Reporting by Laura MacInnis; Editing by Catherine Evans)

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