Country Director and representative for the World Food Programme (WFP) Caribbean Office Brian Bogart says securing food for Jamaicans hardest hit by Hurricane Melissa is the organisation’s first priority.

Bogart, who was speaking in an interview with JIS News on Thursday during a tour of St Elizabeth with technical directors from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, said the entity is assessing the needs of the people to determine how best to lend assistance.

“The first priority really is making sure that we have food and getting food upstream so that we have it available to distribute downstream,” he said.

He noted that the WFP is doing airlifts from Barbados and Panama and trying to see what purchases can be made locally to feed into the relief effort in St Elizabeth and other areas that are hardest hit by the disaster.

“We want to begin setting up mobile warehousing and other aspects of the logistics response so that we can then move to distribution as quickly as possible,” he noted further.

The WFP has also been collaborating with other humanitarian aid groups, such as Food For the Poor and Jamaica Red Cross, to strengthen their outreach.

The organisation has been working with the Ministry of Labour and Social Security to digitise the Jamaica Household Disaster Impact Needs Assessment (JHDINA) forms.  This is an important step towards making damage assessment easier, enabling the Ministry to reach more persons in need.

The WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian organisation working to save lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to stability for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.