Lyse Doucet reads out what the WFP has said -- "There is no evidence that half of the food aid was diverted"
Giancarlo Cirri, WFP, these questions touch on reputations,- there's a lot at stake. At WFP we feel that our reputation is our greatest asset, it's crucial to us.
Giancarlo Cirri says WFP accepts 2% of transport losses of food aid -- beyond this evaluations as to why this is happening are triggered
Giancarlo Cirri has seen WFP food aid in the market - most of the time it tells us that the humanitarian effort is not enough - it tells us that WFP food aid is the only valuable asset within a community
Giancarlo Cirri describes frustration when WFP is working to deliver 100 metric tons of food aid to hungry, two bags appear in a market, and suddenly the organisation faces major media spotlight.
Jonathan Rugman says he met a culture of denial when he raised questions about food aid not reaching its destination
Ishbel Matheson says aid sector is not good at managing risk to reputations, they get driven into denial tactic.
Ishbel Matheson - aid agencies work in risky situations but get driven into denial tactics
Ishbel Matheson, now Head of Media at Save the Children, says the aid sector is not good at managing reputational risk - they driven to denial too quickly when a nuanced approach woul be much more successful
Ishbel Matheson brings up the recent controversy over Band Aid food being distributed in Ethiopia
Ishbel M - first job as an aid agency is to find out what is going on..(talks about Ethiopia) Save the children on the ground and did not report first hand the situation..
Ishbel Matheson says if we lost public trust it loses us much that we need to operate effectively - we must first find out what happened before speaking out
Ishbel Matheson says people will understand that things can go wrong in difficult circumstances.
"Things can go wrong" - we need to be better at talking about it, Ishbel Matheson, Media Director at Save the Children
Ishbel Matheson was the BBC East Africa correspondent from 2000-2005, winning international press awards for her coverage of Darfur. She holds an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex. Ishbel is now the Director of Media at Save the Children in the UK.
Ishbel M: Too often aid agencies expect to be beyond reproach - we need to communicate the complexity of the situations we work in
Richard Dowden - any aid agency who thinks they can send food into a place like Somalia and it get to the people who need it most without major losses is living in a fantasy
Richard Dowden tells a story of a WFP director in Uganda who played hardball with rebels diverting food aid - cutting food supplies in half when the same food kept appearing in markets week -on-week
Lyse Doucet - can WFP just tell the truth about how many sacks of food were diverted?
Giancarlo Cirri denies that he or WFP is in denial over accusations of food diversion.
Panel discussing whether to "play hardball" in reporting what's happening on the ground or to have a more tactical approach and be more open
Giancarlo Cirri reminds that the main reason food aid goes astray is that because beneficiaries try to sell it themselves.
What are acceptable losses of aid in a complex environment? Our panel discusses this thorny issue
Jonathan Rugman - many figures in his report came from WFP itself - after the report came out they then backtracked
Giancarlo Cirri says there were many mistakes in the UN Monitoring Group's report on food diversion in Somalia and key claims were unsubstantiated.
Jonathan Rugman is asking why has the WFP suspended three contractors?
Jonathan Rugman says many aid workers have thanked him for his report - many think it's good to have these issues in the open
Rugman saying being open and fessing up much easier said than done
Rugman - huge issues about upsetting the donors and making yourself accountable
Giancarlo Cirri says as an institution we have to accept a certain level of risk, and donors , governments must also
Giancarlo Cirri stresses that WFP really wants to clarify what happened in Somalia, that investigations are under way.
Ishbel Matheson says she finds the idea that "doing good is beyond criticism" is a very outdated one held by the aid world
Isbel M - the reason we have to get better is that the political and public atmosphere is changing and have sophisticated responses in criticism, we have to get better because in our interest to do so
Richard Downden The overblown idea that aid can solve all the ills of poverty is part of the problem here - we know Africa won't meet the MDGs
Dowden - Aid world is setting itself up for failure with these MDGs as committments made may not be entirely realistic
Richard Dowden: We shouldn't expect aid alone to have the answer - and we should stop pretending it does
pRichard Dowden - people should be told the reality - that food will go astray - right from the start. they have to know that the aid business is a messy one. They will probably accept that as long it's clear
