PITCHBALA, Feb 2: The United Nations will be forced to drastically scale down life-saving aid flights in earthquake-hit areas if it does not get fresh donations within a month, says a top official.
Survivors might not be able to rebuild their lives and would be vulnerable to any new tremors if helicopters ferrying vital food and shelter were reduced, UN World Food Programme’s regional director Amir Abdulla said.
“What we will do (if flights are scaled back) is set back people’s recovery. People will lose more than they have already,” Abdulla said as he visited the snowbound village of Pitchbala during a helicopter tour of the quake zone.
“If you don’t help people recover they might not be able to eke out an existence, and if you get another shock many, many more people will die.”
The WFP is feeding one million people in Azad Kashmir and the NWFP and is also responsible for running all helicopter flights for other UN agencies involved in the aid effort.
Funding for the UN’s fleet of 20 aid helicopters runs out at the end of February and it will need 11 million dollars a month in March, April and possibly May, Abdulla said.
It will then need $6-7 million a month for the rest of the year to keep them airborne, although the figure could rise in July if landslides caused by monsoon rains wipe out key roads, as geologists fear.
Abdulla said there was an increased sense of optimism in the aid community but warned survivors were “not out of the woods yet”.
“The major challenge over the next few months, and the months after that, is maintaining not so much the donor interest as the donor will, or donor ability, to fund what needs to be done,” the WFP official said.
“It’s not just for food, it’s medicine, blankets and corrugated iron sheeting for shelter.”
The international community was already stretched by other humanitarian crises including Sudan’s Darfur region and an impending famine in the Horn of Africa, he said.
Many countries including the United States and NATO members sent choppers immediately after the earthquake and Washington recently agreed its four giant Chinooks would continue to fly mercy missions until April, Abdulla said.— AFP
