“The ship escort system has worked quite well,” Casella told The Associated Press. “When we’ve had escorts, we have had not any incidents of piracy on WFP-contracted ships.”

Some 90 percent of WFP food aid to Somalia is shipped by sea. Flying food aid in is too expensive and too many bandits plague Somalia’s roads.

WFP plans to feed 3.5 million Somalis this year, which requires shipping 43,000 tons of food every month, Casella said.

Before the escorts started in 2007, six ships with WFP food were hijacked over three years. Then different Western navies stepped in.

For six weeks last summer, WFP had to temporarily suspend food shipments to Somalia because it had no escorts, said Casella. Canada then took over escorting the food aid and subsequently the EU.

The food usually arrives in the Kenyan port of Mombasa where it is offloaded onto smaller vessels that bring it to Somalia.

The agency is worried about a cargo ship hijacked Tuesday, the Lebanese-owned MV Sea Horse, which was heading to Mumbai, India, to pick up 7,327 tons of WFP food for Somalia.

The Sea Horse was not a WFP-contracted ship when it was hijacked, but would have flown under WFP flag once the food was loaded, she said.

“We’re very concerned that people in Somalia would go hungry unless the Sea Horse is released,” she said.

The American ship Maersk Alamaba, which escaped a pirate attack last week, was bringing food aid to the region as a donation for WFP and was not contracted by the agency, she said.

 

 

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