Bush niece helps launch UN food agency’s student website against hunger

Describing the chronic hunger faced by more than 800 million people as “the most important humanitarian crisis in the world today,” one of the globe’s more famous students, Lauren Bush, today helped launch a campaign by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to encourage students to participate more in the fight against hunger.

Ms. Bush, a niece of United States President George W. Bush, has been named honorary spokesperson for WFP’s student campaign against hunger which, together with malnutrition, kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

At UN Headquarters in New York, Ms. Bush launched a website designed to give students up-to-date information on global hunger and suggested initiatives, such as letter-writing appeals or fundraising events.

The site is run by Friends of the WFP, set up to support the work of the UN humanitarian agency, which last year gave food to more than 100 million people worldwide.

WFP has labelled the global hunger issue as a “silent emergency,” with statistics showing that, on average, somewhere in the world a child dies every five seconds from hunger.

Ms. Bush, a 19-year-old student at Princeton University in the US, said her interest in the issue of global hunger had accelerated since a recent three-day fact-finding trip with WFP workers to Guatemala. She said she plans to make future trips to Africa to further spotlight the problem.

Ms. Bush also encouraged students to join WFP’s “19-cents-a-day” scheme, so-called because it marks the average cost of feeding a child in school in a developing countries. “For just $34 – the cost of two CDs – we can change a child’s life for an entire school year,” she said.