Sixty percent of Iraqis subsist entirely on food brought in through the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program, which distributes monthly rations to 16 million people via a complex system of local and national centers. "One of the problems in Iraq," says Alfred Ironside, a spokesman for Unicef in New York, "one of the big problems, is that people rely on these food rations, and it's often a very basic basket of items. There's not sufficient meat with proteins and other basic nutrients. Usually it's not sufficient for lactating women or women with small children. As a result, a quarter of all children are born underweight."

During the past few weeks, in preparation for war, Unicef and the Iraqi Ministry of Health began to distribute 1,000 metric tons of "high-protein biscuits" to 400,000 of these most needy cases. The biscuits, which are easy to transport and require no preparation, contain "protein, calories and micronutrients and have proved to be highly effective in saving lives in emergencies around the world," according to Unicef. The agency managed to complete the distribution just before the United Nations ordered its staff to leave the country on Monday. "We did it just under the wire," Ironside says. Now, the agency's national staff -- about 170 Iraqis -- will try to "manage operations as best they can, inasmuch as it is safe for them to do so."

In December, Saddam Hussein's government increased the food rations available to Iraqis, and as a result most households are thought to have about six weeks' worth of food stockpiled. Most aid agencies expect a war to disrupt or completely destroy the oil-for-food system, but if the war lasts just a couple weeks and the food can be quickly restored when the fighting stops, Ironside speculates that most Iraqis won't suffer terrible shortages. But he notes that "even a short war could displace a lot of people, and then you have a different kind of scenario. For displaced people -- let's say their homes are destroyed -- you have to make sure that they'll have a way to be getting the food they need."

But other aid workers are worried that Iraq's food distribution system is so complex and would be so thoroughly roiled during a war that it could take at least a month to restore the flow of provisions to the population. Joel Charny, the vice president for policy at Refugees International, says that the U.S. must prepare for the worst-case food situation in Iraq -- a scenario in which no rations are readily available for most Iraqis. In that case, he says, the U.S. should immediately donate money to the World Food Program to purchase at least one month's and possibly two months' worth of grain for 24 million Iraqis, at a cost of $200 million per month.

Charny is appalled that the U.S. has not acknowledged that hundreds of millions of dollars of food aid might be required in Iraq, especially since USAID has invited a handful of corporations with close ties to the White House to bid on a billion-dollar infrastructure reconstruction contract in postwar Iraq. "By all means, let's think about having money to rebuild bridges and roads and electrical plants," he says, "but there's a glaring contrast between preparations for private firms to do that kind of large-scale work and the lack of funding for the U.N. and NGOs to provide aid to Iraqis. The administration is getting ahead of itself. The survival of the Iraqi population is not yet restored."

From her hotel room in Kuwait City on Tuesday night, Cassandra Nelson, of Mercy Corps, described a city that has girded itself for war. "People are carrying on with their lives -- it's not as if everybody's hiding inside -- but there is heightened security," she said. "There's a lot of the Kuwaiti military stationed around the city, a lot of vehicles set up with large guns on turrets. The major concern for Kuwait is if there's any kind of chemical or biological attack on the city, and you see people preparing for that. There's a whole system of sirens they've developed, with different kind of sirens for when a bomb goes off, and another one that's the all-clear for when they've identified that it's not a chemical bomb, that you can go out."

But Nelson's preparations for aid, like those of many of the aid agencies here, have been stalled by a lack of money. A Mercy Corps executive in Oregon described the group as "operating on fumes" right now, and Nelson backed up that claim. Staff members in Kuwait have no transportation -- "we have to take taxis around the city," Nelson said. There's no money to rent warehouses for supplies, or to hire local people to help in the aid efforts. "What we're looking to do is assist half a million Iraqis who've been displaced by the war, and we'll be providing food, water, tents, household items like cooking sets and hygiene sets," Nelson said. "So what we've been spending a lot of our time doing is identifying where we can get the trucks, where do we get the food, what do we do when we do get the money."

Like other relief groups, Mercy Corps has appealed for funding from the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and many private foundations, and it expects to receive more than $20 million in aid. But the group has no indication of when that money will flow in.

"And that's one of the frustrating things -- we have not gotten any clarity," Nelson said. "We're in a little bit of a waiting period in terms of being able to make great strides forward and prepare for this event. We don't know when the money is coming -- but we hope that now that the terms have been so clearly laid out by President Bush, it's going to encourage donor agencies to give us the funds immediately. Because if they give us the money after the war starts it might be too late."

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