World Food Programme
United Nations branch related to food-assistance
The World Food Programme (WFP) is an international organization within the United Nations (UN) that provides food assistance worldwide. It is the world's largest humanitarian organization and the leading provider of school meals. Founded in 1961, WFP is headquartered in Rome and has offices in 87 countries. In 2023 it supported over 152 million people, and it is present in more than 120 countries and territories.
In addition to emergency food relief, WFP offers technical and development assistance, such as building capacity for emergency preparedness and response, managing supply chains and logistics, promoting social safety programs, and strengthening resilience against climate change. It is also a major provider of direct cash assistance, and provides passenger services for humanitarian workers through its management of the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS).
WFP is an executive member of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group, a consortium of UN entities that aims to fulfil the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), with a priority to achieve SDG 2, "zero hunger", by 2030.
The World Food Programme was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for its efforts to provide food assistance in areas of conflict and to prevent the use of food as a weapon of war and conflict.
History
WFP was established in 1961 after the 1960 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Conference, when George McGovern, director of the US Food for Peace Programmes, proposed establishing a multilateral food aid programme. WFP launched its first programmes in 1963 by the FAO and the United Nations General Assembly on a three-year experimental basis, supporting the Nubian population at Wadi Halfa in Sudan.
“World Food Programme” enters the record as united Nations branch related to food-assistance. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what World, Food and Programme can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q204344. VIAF identifies the subject as 139195550. The Library of Congress control number is n50067600. Authority coordinates are 41.822, 12.408. None of the 19 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1961, 2023, 2030 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “World Food Programme” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.