"This Somali child is just 16 months old. He's dangerously close to dying from hunger. A victim of what may be the worst and least reported humanitarian
crisis anywhere.
The food supposed to keep him alive flows from this vast warehouse in neighbouring Kenya.
- three and a half million Somalis are depending on this aid reaching them this year. The food is administered by the UN's World Food Programme and costs donor governments around a billion dollars.
But Channel 4 News has been on the ground in Somalia, investigating just how much in this food chain reaches those who need it most.

Jonathan Rugman
"Somali refugees say that much of this aid will simply never reach them.
And now the world's biggest humanitarian agency stands accused not just of violating its own principles - but of losing control of an aid
programme meant for millions of desperate people."
 
PIX: APTN May 09
 
Western journalists can't travel here, so we sent a Somali member of our team into
the warzone that is Somalia's capital, Mogadishu.
 
SMI pix till end:
 
And what he discovered about the feeding of the country's 3.5 million was profoundly shocking.
First he went to the city's main market. Here the traders tried to stop him from filming what's for sale. Not hundreds but thousands of sacks of World

Food Programme supplies - maize, wheat and cooking oil - meant for refugees from the country's civil war. The daylight robbery here every match for Somalia's

piracy at sea... with businessmen claiming some WFP officials in Somalia are part of the illegal trade.
"Sometimes we buy it from the World Food Programme officials themselves. They take us to the warehouses used by the WFP and let us load our lorries."

Next our producer travelled up the main road from Mogadishu. Tracing the route taken by hundreds of thousands

of refugees fleeing the fighting, Where 400 000 people live in makeshift huts in the largest concentration of refugees anywhwere in the world.

And among them he found Shukri Muallim. He's just 2 years old, and according to his mother fell ill six weeks ago.

1 in 3 Somali children is malnourished. Little girls like Hawa Abdirhaman, only kept alive by Somali doctors. This tiny feeding centre run by Medecins Sans Frontieres is overwhelmed by the weak and the hungry.

Dr Amina Adan
Medecins Sans Frontieres
"They don't have any food. They become malnourished becauser the father can't work and the mother can't work. They need food."

Refugee camps like this one stretch for 19 miles. The temperature is about a hundred degrees.
"I cannot move because of hunger" this woman told us. "I have nothing, nothing to eat".

This woman asks how she can feed her baby when she has no milk to give.
The Somali member of our team spent 4 days visiting these camps. The only food he saw being cooked was boiled leaves often harvested by children. And again and again, camp elders blamed the World Food Programme, claiming food was being diverted away from the most vulnerable people.

Sheikh Mukhtar
leader "Ifis 1" refugee camp
"We see a lot of lorries. But not everyone gets their share. Most of the food gets divided between various interested parties. What happens is that they bring the food here to prove it's been delivered, but then only offload a small amount and take the rest back with them to the market in Mogadishu to sell!"
Afterwards the camp leader led our camera to the roadside graves of those who had not survived the worst drought in a decade. 28 children dead, he said, in the last 6 months.

The food meant for them leaves this warehouse in the Kenyan port of Mombasa. 45000 tons bound for Somalia every month. And the WFP runs its operation not from Mogadishu but from Nairobi 765 miles away.
Somalia's so dangerous that 4 WFP workers have been killed there in the last year.

I went to see the man in charge of feeding over 3 million Somalis. and he insisted to me that the food is getting through.

Peter Goossens
WFP Country Director, Somalia
"what reaches them high percentage, far less than 2% gets in" etc
The WFP says it can't stop some food being syphoned off, though its drivers are docked money if they don't deliver.

But as we continued our investigation, we were told food was being stolen all along the supply chain. In
this camp, the elders told us WFP guards demand money for ration cards and without those ration cards, families can't eat.

Moallim Mohamed
elder, Bisharo camp
"We've only been issued 200 ration cards instead of the 700 we need. We were forced to pay for these cards, and we're also forced to pay a fee for the armed guards the WFP come here with. ...This in't a one off, this is regular. If we don't pay up, they just cover the truck up, open fire on us and drive away. Even on the last trip, they fired at us and eventually I paid the money myself!"

The WFP say its true that local milita money may demand protection money, but that its never heard of it involving WFP personnel.

The food racketeering hub is this, Mogadishu's main market, The WFP says food resale is just small scale. That you can't stop some refugees from selling what they are given. That any major diversion of aid, and its network of staff would know.

But Channel 4 News counted 10 warehouses and 15 shops involved in the trade. With most of the aid coming from Somalia's biggest donor, the United States. Revealing this lucrative business could get these stallholders shot. But we wanted to find out how the trade works and eventually several businessmen did agree to talk.

Many traders told us of fictional refugee camps, which are invented in order to be allocated food, which can then be sold.

"You go to the WFP office and fill in an application form to create a camp. When we receive the food, we give out some, and then divide the rest between ourselves and the WFP guys, who negotiated the deal."
Another confessed that stealing food from the needy was a "real shame" but, he said, business is business.
"We buy aid from WFP staff directly or from people they employ. The goods are freely available and you can buy as much as you like, but we usually buy no more than 500 to 1000 sacks at a time. Just a ton or half a ton a day can be shifted more discreetly!"

Peter Goossens
WFP Country Director, Somalia
"we have had cases in the past, we gave investigated, staff long gone, yes uou have your problem areas, we will investigate, we take action we have many of those cases in past"

The WFP says its committed to transparency, that its increased its staff and independent monitoring, that it takes allegations extremely seriously and that its not even heard of fictional camps before. And though the UN has admitted to us that "thousands of sacks" have gone missing in the last few months, the WFP insists its operation is under control.

Peter Goossens
NO ASTON "we are doing a vg good job, and the donors know it"

But what we've revealed tells these donors a different story. Abdullahi Noor just 16 months old, and fighting for his life because of a lack of food and water. In a humanitarian emergency so rarely filmed, that its horrors are almost completely hidden from the outside world.
ENDS