Agency official: World Food Program ramps up food aid in La Guaira after Venezuela earthquakes

An agency official with the World Food Program, reporting from La Guaira, said emergency food distributions are under way after back-to-back earthquakes struck Venezuela last week.

"The situation here, as it can happen in any catastrophe of this magnitude, is devastating," the agency official said, describing widespread need for shelter, water and food. The official said they met families with urgent needs, including "one man I met yesterday told me, holding his three sons by the hand, that he had no shelter, no food, no water. The mother had been taken to the hospital in Caracas."

The official said the World Food Program had established its first food distribution point in La Guaira and had "reached 1,200 with emergency food parcels in the couple of days." The speaker added that the agency plans "to reach half a million people in shelters over the next 3 months," framing a three-month operational target for aid delivery.

The official said search-and-rescue efforts are now "giving way to a full-blown humanitarian response," and emphasized coordination with local authorities to move quickly and maintain the flow of assistance to those most in need. "We continue working with the authorities to move very quickly to reach people where they are and to maintain the flow of assistance to those who need it the most," the official said.

The report does not list donors, specific funding amounts, partner agencies beyond the World Food Program, or a detailed logistics plan; those details were not specified in the transcript. The timing of expanded distributions and the exact geographic coverage of the planned 500,000-person target were also not specified beyond the three-month horizon mentioned by the speaker.