Providing emergency relief in a humanitarian crisis is far trickier in practice than in theory. The Sphere project (www.sphereproject.org), “a consortium of the international humanitarian community,” published a handbook in January 2000 describing minimum standards and related key indicators applicable to emergency relief programmes. This “humanitarian charter” covers water and sanitation, nutrition, food aid, shelter and site planning, and medical services. But in this week's BMJ Andre Griekspoor and Steve Collins give an account of Sudan's famine (p 740) and argue that a flexible approach is needed, especially when there is the danger of supplies being requisitioned by armed factions. Food aid largely falls under the remit of the World Food Programme (www.wfp.org), a UN organisation, which is being criticised for withdrawing aid from Afghanistan, whose humanitarian crisis is deepening by the day (p 755). Already 20% of babies born in Afghanistan are low birth weight (http://savethechildrenfund.org/mothers/newborns/appendix2.shtml) and a quarter of children die by the age of 5 years. The World Food Programme estimates that more than 800 million people go to bed hungry each day, and 24 000 die each day from hunger and related causes. Most contributions to the World Food Programme are voluntary donations from governments, and up to 10 September it had received $1.4bn this year, mostly ($0.99bn) from the United States. One agency unlikely to pull out of a humanitarian crisis is Medecins Sans Frontieres, whose website (http://msf.org/home.cfm) is strong on news but hasn't yet made its publications available on line. Its counterpart, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, does already make some publications available completely or in part on its website, including the World Disasters Report 2001 (http://www.ifrc.org/publicat/).