Sharing favourite meal helps feed world's young hungry

From sushi to pizza or spicy chicken curry, favourite meals are being transformed into cash for school dinners to feed the world's hungry in a new social networking scheme from the World Food Programme.

The wefeedback campaign, which launched in March, has already provided 110,000 meals to hungry children in 60 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, WFP's web representative Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski told AFP.

The new web community (www.wefeedback.org) uses a calculator to work out how many children could be fed if users donated the money they usually spent on their favourite meal to feeding those less fortunate.

"We wanted to make it easy to donate without asking for too much money," Wielezynski said. Users can donate the cost of their meal online and spread the world through social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The cost of a 12 euro (17 dollars) Thai green curry provides enough money for 60 school meals, for example, while the price of a luxury 22 euro chocolate Easter egg would feed another 110 children.

"If you do the calculations, chocolate and sweets sales in Britain and the United States over the Easter period are worth 2,1 billion dollars, the amount necessary to fund our programme for two years," Wielezynski said.

"This is not a campaign for one or two months, we want to see how the Web can help important causes in the long term," he said, adding that the WFP's school food programme feeds 22 million children each year.

The scheme is backed by celebrities such as US actress Drew Barrymore, singer Christina Aguilera and Brazilian footballer Kaka, who have already raised money for thousands of meals by encouraging their online fans to donate.