Josette Sheeran

Josette Sheeran (born 1954) is the eleventh Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), a position she assumed in April 2007. As leader of WFP, Ms. Sheeran manages the world's largest humanitarian agency, which provides food assistance to more than 105 million people in 75 countries including victims of war and natural disasters, orphans and families affected by HIV and AIDS, and children in poor communities.

Food security is not only a matter of humanitarian assistance and agricultural development; it is a matter of national security, peace and stability.

Quotes

The world is at a crossroads. Our generation may be the first in history with the knowledge, tools and resources to truly turn back the rising tide of hunger and misery.

I believe we're living at a time in human history where it's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don't know where to find a cup of food.

I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, "No more. No more are we going to accept this."

If anything is to be learned from the recent uprisings across the world, it is that the needs of people cannot be ignored.

• A silent tsunami which knows no borders is sweeping the world.
  • Regarding world hunger; reported in Graeme Taylor, Evolution's Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World (2008), p. 46.

• If any good comes out of the current famine in the Horn of Africa — amidst the pictures of mothers carrying dying babies at their shrivelled breasts and hollow-eyed children with swollen bellies and matchstick limbs — it will be galvanising the world on the need to ensure access to nutritious food for the world’s most vulnerable people.
  • "Filling empty bellies is no longer enough" (20 September 2011) at UK Government Department for International Development web site

• With climate change and health crises rightfully receiving international attention, the time has come to focus on hunger as a top priority. WHO regards hunger and malnutrition as the gravest threat to public health, and climate change threatens to further destabilise already fragile food-production systems.
  • The Lancet Volume 371, Issue 9608, Pages 180 - 181, (19 January 2008)

• I believe we're living at a time in human history where it's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don't know where to find a cup of food. Not only that, transforming hunger is an opportunity, but I think we have to change our mindsets. I am so honored to be here with some of the world's top innovators and thinkers. And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, "No more. No more are we going to accept this." And we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted, but that exists no more.
  • "Ending Hunger Now" TED Talk (July 2011)

• I am in the hunger business; it is what we do exclusively, 24/7, and I am sorry to tell you that business is booming.
  • Addressing the World Food Programme meeting, 21 September 2009 [1]

Quotes about Sheeran

• Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, stated that people who don't have food have three choices – "revolt, migrate or die". "We need a better plan," she said, pointing to the one in seven people who are food insecure. 70% of brain growth takes place before the age of two so deprivation of food in infants is long-lasting.
  • David Shariatmadari, in "Davos 2012: Day two, as it happened" in The Guardian (26 January 2012)

External links

• Profile at IMDb
• Executive Director World Food Programme
• Renaissance Women Network Profile