PAKISTAN: Helicopters ferrying food and supplies to Pakistan's quake victims stranded in the Himalayas may have to be grounded in just days if donors fail to increase emergency relief aid, a UN official said yesterday.
Aid workers are scrambling to supply the millions of Pakistanis who have no food, water, shelter or medicine in the freezing temperatures of the Himalayas. Workers have resorted to rafts and pack mules to reach them, but helicopters, though costly, have proven the most useful.
"When the money runs out, the choppers stay on the ground and that's what's going to start happening in the next couple of days," said Robert Smith, financial expert at the UN's leading disaster relief body, the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The October 8th quake killed at least 54,400 people in northern Pakistan, wounded around 74,000 and left up to three million people homeless, according to official estimates.
Relief workers and earthquake survivors were disappointed by a meagre $16 million (€13.2 million) raised at a donor conference in Geneva on Wednesday that had been designed to raise $550 million.
Hopes faded for a second-day surge in donations as UN staff recorded only $2 million in net new contributions yesterday, bringing the total to $113 million - far short of the $550 million the UN says it needs to avert a catastrophe.
The UN's World Food Programme, charged with the logistics for the entire UN relief effort, said it was alarmed that so little money had been committed.
"Without new donations, we can't procure food or fly the helicopters," the programme said in a statement. "With hundreds of thousands of people still cut off by landslides and winter setting in, there are fears that desperately needed aid could come too late."
Mr Smith said helicopters were virtually the only way to supply those stranded as the quake, snows and landslides triggered by some 900 recorded aftershocks have made most roads impassable.
One large helicopter can cost up to $6,000 per hour, he said. "Nobody is using helicopters for fun. They do it because they have to," he added. Because much of the money is earmarked for specific uses, that leaves critical aid areas short of funds, a spokeswoman for the OCHA said.
In terms of cash, the UN's emergency budget for shelter for the earthquake region has only 2 per cent of its needs met, food 4 per cent, water and sanitation 5 per cent, and health 17 per cent, she said.
Oxfam has suggested that some donors may have misplaced priorities, giving money for home-building for next year as survivors now face starvation and disease in the snow. Some UN agencies have already run out of cash.