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Lack of fresh funding will scale down quake flights: UN

* WFP to distribute food for another two years

PITCHBALA: The United Nations will be forced to drastically scale down life-saving aid flights in earthquake-hit Pakistan if it does not get fresh donations within a month, a top official said.

Survivors may not be able to rebuild their lives and would be vulnerable to any new tremors if helicopters ferrying vital food and shelter are reduced, UN World Food Programme (WFP) regional director Amir Abdulla said, speaking to journalists.

“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 UN has called the four-month airlift to aid devastated and cut-off Himalayan villages the biggest in history. The WFP is feeding one million people in devastated Pakistani Kashmir and North West Frontier Province and is also responsible for running all chopper flights for the 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 six to seven million dollars 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.

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.

The helicopters had so far prevented the “second and third waves of death” that the UN warned of among survivors, initially from injuries sustained in the earthquake and then from cold, hunger and disease, Abdullah said.

“What the helicopters have done here is remarkable, they really stopped a catastrophe,” he said after meeting US servicemen earlier in his tour at a helicopter base in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir.

“If we hadn’t had them, people would have died in the hills.” But ever since the quake, the UN has been forced to issue repeated appeals for funds to keep the helicopters in the air, and has still only received 335 million dollars of a 550-million-dollar appeal made in mid-October.

The WFP will now need to distribute food in Pakistan for another two years, Abdulla said, posing a further financial challenge.

In the first year it will be feeding 700,000-800,000 people, costing around 80 million dollars, and around 400,000 in the second as initiatives to get local farmers back on their feet take effect.

“If you don’t do this now people will not be able to recover,” Abdulla said. afp

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