Systemwatch: an occasional series on individual members of the United Nations family.

• Position: Interview

In spite of today's technological advances and economic growth, hundreds of millions of people are hungry and suffer from malnutrition - most of them women and children in third world countries. The lack of sufficient food will have a devastating impact on future generations in many parts of the world. Catherine Bertini, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), talked to Michael Littlejohns of the United Nations television programme World Chronicle about this problem. Joining in the conversation were Thalif Deen of Inter Press Service and Barbara Crossette of The New York Times.

Littlejohns: Tell us about WFP. How do you operate?

Bertini: WFP is the UN's front-line agency fighting hunger. It has probably the largest budget of any single agency in the system. We accept food donations, mostly from Governments, and we do assessments of the needs in the poorest countries of the world, of the poorest people, of people living amidst conflict, and of refugees. Then we provide food assistance based on totally voluntary contributions.

Littlejohns: You give the food away, or are you able to sell some of it?

Bertini: We do a lot of things with it. People in the midst of conflict receive food aid in order to keep them alive. We use food to help people grow, to reach people at critical times in their lives when food is very important - for pregnant women, for instance, for children under five. That is food that is distributed directly to the individuals, perhaps through a school feeding programme or health centres. But then we also use food for work, where we pay people with food rather than with cash, to build something constructive in their community that they themselves have decided would be helpful for the long-term economic benefit of their community. Occasionally, we sell some of the food in order to provide some other implements, but it is a very tiny percentage of our food aid.

Deen: I believe during the last few years your agency has been spending over 70 per cent of its resources on disaster relief. How does this affect your development objectives?

Bertini: The world community is very generous when it comes to individuals who need food in order to live. But the development part of our work is not as easy to describe, and seeing a difference that development food aid makes - for instance, in helping a farmer in Colombia to build an irrigation canal and have him become 10 times as productive as he was before, or helping a...