This year, global humanitarian and sports icon Muhammad Ali, along with Christina Aguilera, joined forces to help WFP’s Haiti relief efforts by appearing in a global Public Service Announcement underwritten by the Yum! Brands Foundation. Donations raised through Ali and Aguilera’s PSA, highlighting a text message and online campaign, went directly to support WFP’s efforts to get food to earthquake survivors in Haiti. Yum! also directed $500,000 from its World Hunger Relief effort to help WFP provide food for earthquake victims, and the Yum! Brands Foundation matched all Yum! employee donations up to a system-wide total of $500,000. Click here to read more.

In 2009, Aguilera helped raised awareness of the hunger issue by appearing in the World Hunger Relief campaign’s global public service announcement and advertisement where she sings Beautiful on a busy corner in Los Angeles to raise money for hunger relief. Aguilera also appeared in the campaign’s restaurant posters with the quote, “Together, we have the power to save lives and go from hunger to hope” and online efforts. Thanks to Aguilera’s involvement in 2009, she helped raise $22.5 million for WFP and other hunger agencies – that enabled WFP to provide more than 90 million meals to hungry people.

In the past three years, Yum! Brands’ World Hunger Relief campaign has raised nearly $60 million for WFP and other hunger relief organizations and is helping to provide approximately 250 million meals, saving the lives of millions of people in remote corners of the world. More than 1.4 million of the Company’s employees, franchisees and their families have volunteered more than 15 million hours to aid hunger relief efforts in communities worldwide. In January 2010, Yum! Brands was honored to be named WFP’s Partner of the Year at the World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos. Additionally, PR Week awarded World Hunger Relief with top honors as the “Cause–Related Campaign of the Year 2010”.

For more than ten years, the Company has also donated more than $46 million of prepared food annually to the underprivileged in the United States. Since the Company went public in 1997, it has donated more than $550 million of its food to hunger relief agencies in the U.S. The Company also has been the primary sponsor of the Dare to Care Food Bank in Louisville for nine years, and has donated $9 million to this local agency.

At the Clinton Global Initiative in 2008, Yum! Brands was recognized for its hunger relief efforts. Over a five-year span, the Company pledged to: raise and donate at least $80 million to help WFP and others provide 200 million meals for hungry school children in developing countries; donate 20 million hours of hunger relief volunteer service in the communities in which it operates; donate $200 million worth of its prepared food to hunger agencies in the United States; and use the Company’s marketing clout to generate awareness of the hunger problem, and convince others to become part of the solution.

Yum! is also co-leading the Business Council to End Global Hunger. The new effort will encourage trade associations, companies and other private sector entities in the United States to support the Roadmap to End Global Hunger – an advocacy initiative laying out a comprehensive strategy for the U.S. government to set the stage for a permanent end to global hunger and poverty.

There are nearly 1 billion hungry people around the world today. Hunger and malnutrition are in fact the number one risk to the health worldwide — greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Among the key causes of hunger are natural disasters, conflict, poverty, poor agricultural infrastructure and over-exploitation of the environment. Recently, financial and economic crises have pushed more people into hunger.

WFP is the largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide. Each year, on average, WFP feeds more than 90 million people in more than 70 countries.