Catherine Bertini Quotations

The window of opportunity to avert famine is rapidly closing and could already have closed. The real issue facing us is not whether there will be famine but how many people will actually die.

The mother has to have enough food in order to produce enough milk in order to breast feed, but she has to know that she should breast feed. That's an education issue.

We need a new definition of malnutrition. Malnutrition means under- and over-nutrition. Malnutrition means emaciated and obese.

At the World Food Programme we have recognized what a valuable tool food aid can be in changing behaviour. In so many poorer countries food is money, food is power.....

Food availability is not really the issue. The quality of the food is what we recognize is the problem.

We're appealing to donors to come through very quickly now with additional resources, because floods are not something that we can work on a few weeks later when bureaucracies are done making decisions ... we have to help people today.

More and more people are at risk because the rains have not come. We will be coming back in the next few weeks with additional requests. We do not know how much more will be requested, it needs to be further assessed ... but I expect it will be more than 100,000 tons.

Large amounts of food aid and humanitarian assistance have been delivered but the low level of commercial food imports and limited agricultural output are jeopardizing the nutritional stability of the whole population -- especially women, children and the elderly.

These assessments continue to show us that even if there's a relatively good harvest, there is not enough food in the country to sustain all the people who need food.

An escalation of fighting will strike a deadly blow to thousands of extremely fragile people.

Even with a relatively good harvest there is not enough food in the country to sustain all the people who need it.

It's very good news, because our interest -- all of our interests -- are to help people go home.

They'll die because of the lack of food, the lack of sanitation and the lack of water and of the diseases ... as a result of the fighting in the region.

The drips were very crude, almost like water bottles with plastic tubing coming out. We saw other children who had marks on their faces from various stages of malnutrition. These children were in very bad shape.