Let me try to put the current humanitarian crises in context and, at the same time, tell you a bit about the World Food Program's role in addressing hunger.
Up to the early 1990s, WFP used most of its food aid in food for work, nutrition and education projects. But in recent years we have been forced to become an ambulance service for the starving. Nearly 80 percent of our work is now emergency driven -- reaching out to Afghan families suffering the effects of drought and decades of war, malnourished infants and children of North Korea, and families driven from their homes by violence in Chechnya, southern Sudan and Colombia. Today, WFP has few resources for nutrition and school feeding to help bring the number of chronically hungry people down from 800 million -- we are barely funding our emergency operations and, I am afraid, the worst is yet to come.
The number of food emergencies is skyrocketing. In the first half of the 1990s, WFP conducted 18 emergency food needs assessments per year with FAO, in the second half the number nearly doubled to 33. The number of victims of natural disasters has tripled compared to the 1960s, averaging 136 million a year and the poorest among them need food assistance. This year WFP faces the daunting task of finding $1.8 billion just to run our operations in Africa -- a sum equal to all the funds we received last year. Never before have we had to contend with potential starvation on the scale we face today.
The sheer intensity of these crises has transformed WFP into the largest humanitarian agency in the world. Few people know that. At the same time, we have quietly become the logistics arm of the United Nations when emergencies strike -- providing air service and communications links for other UN agencies and our NGO partners. At the height of the bombing campaign against the Taliban, we kept 2 000 trucks on the road every day. We brought food to 6 million hungry Afghans who were already reeling from the effects of three years of drought, the oppression of the Taliban, and decades of civil war.
Our annual budget already outstrips the UN in New York. We were the first UN agency to ever get a contribution of more than a billion dollars from a single member state -- the United States. Eight of our ten leading donors have boosted contributions, in part because we have one of the lowest overhead rates you can find. Yet with all this generosity, we are falling behind.
For lack of funds, WFP is now engaged in an exercise in triage among those threatened by starvation. Who will we feed? Who will we leave hungry? In North Korea we have had to cut off rations for 3 million women, children and the elderly. In Afghanistan we have delayed and cut rations. Refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda are always teetering at the edge, about to run out of food for people who simply cannot help themselves. And now, a task that could dwarf all our earlier relief operations may well await us in Iraq if no political solution is found to the current impasse.
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