Food for Development

Abstract

Although WFP had an important role to play in emergencies (see Chapter 6), its main focus of attention for most of the first 30 years of its operations was on using food aid in support of economic and social development projects. Two distinct phases may be discerned during this period: the first decade to the major watershed of the World Food Conference in 1974 during which WFP was faced with unstable and fluctuating resources and searched for a distinct identity; and much of the next 20 years during which project food aid was fully developed and institutionalized. The remaining years in the 1990s, during which emergency operations were to become WFP’s main concern, are described in Chapters 6 and 9.