Dakar, Senegal — FAO Ambassador Miriam Makeba has handed over new fishing boats and nets to Mozambican fishing communities whose livelihoods were devastated when flooding and a cyclone struck the country early last year.

"We are here today to try and give them something back from all that was taken by the cyclone and floods," Makeba said Friday at a ceremony held in Inhambane, 200km north of Maputo.

The boats were built in Mozambican shipyards, an FAO press release said.

The first batch of 290 boats and canoes were distributed to fishing communities, in the final stage of an FAO rehabilitation project for Inhambane, Sofala and Gaza provinces, financed by the Italian government.

An active supporter of FAO's campaign against world hunger since her appointment as FAO Ambassador in 1999, Makeba said that the rehabilitation project would enable more than 2,000 beneficiaries "to work and put food on the tables of their families."

During her stay in Mozambique, Makeba will visit other FAO rehabilitation projects, including a group of women's farming co-operatives on the outskirts of Maputo, which received vegetable seeds and farming tools after floods destroyed their crops and belongings.

Makeba is one of six FAO Ambassadors, together with singers Dee Dee Bridgewater and Youssou N'Dour, actresses Gina Lollobrigida and Gong Li, and Nobel Prize winner Rita Levi Montalcini.

The purpose of the FAO Ambassador Programme is to attract public and media attention to the unacceptable situation that more than 800 million people continue to suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition in a time of unprecedented plenty.