Nepal earthquake victims.
Rome:
Eleven days after a devastating earthquake rocked Nepal, UN officials are scrambling to get aid to remote mountain regions, deploying yaks, goats and old Russian helicopters to carry rice and high-energy biscuits to 1.4 million hungry people.
"It's a race against time," Richard Ragan, a senior official with the UN World Food Programme, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Wednesday.
By the end of the week, the WFP hopes to have distributed enough rice to sustain those in urgent need of food for 10 days.
Some of the worst-affected places are hard-to-reach villages in the districts of Dhading, Gorkha, Nuwakot and Rasuwa, which were already struggling with hunger before the 7.8 magnitude quake, the largest to hit Nepal in 80 years.
Military teams from China, the United States, India and Britain are working with the Nepali army to ferry aid into what Ragan calls some of "the most difficult terrain on earth".
Getting food into these areas, some of them a four-day walk from the nearest distribution centre, can be three times as expensive as regular aid missions, he said.
UN agencies have launched an emergency appeal for $415 million, including $128 million in food-related needs. That number is expected to rise when authorities have calculated the full scale of the destruction.
The quake on April 25 killed more than 7,500 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
HARVEST PROBLEMS
As well as killing thousands and affecting an estimated 8 million Nepalis, the quake ravaged food supplies in parts of the mountainous, landlocked country.
In the worst-hit areas, more than 60 per cent of households have lost most or all their farm assets, a spokesman for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.
Nepal was "suffering chronic food insecurity" even before the quake, the FAO's Jeff Tschirley told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The destruction of crops and deaths of thousands of livestock as a result of the quake means that even if hunger is alleviated this year, it could become severe in 2016, he said.
Many farmers will be unable to plant their next crop before the rainy season in June, and getting seeds, fertilizer and new plough animals into rural areas will be difficult, Tschirley said.
Nepal's agriculture ministry is still trying to assess the scale of the damage to food supplies, and is likely to make more specific requests for outside help in the coming weeks, said Lakshmi Moola, an official with the International Fund for Agriculture Development, the UN agriculture bank.
"In monetary terms, they still don't know the scale of the losses," Moola told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"It's a race against time," Richard Ragan, a senior official with the UN World Food Programme, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Wednesday.
By the end of the week, the WFP hopes to have distributed enough rice to sustain those in urgent need of food for 10 days.
Some of the worst-affected places are hard-to-reach villages in the districts of Dhading, Gorkha, Nuwakot and Rasuwa, which were already struggling with hunger before the 7.8 magnitude quake, the largest to hit Nepal in 80 years.
Military teams from China, the United States, India and Britain are working with the Nepali army to ferry aid into what Ragan calls some of "the most difficult terrain on earth".
Getting food into these areas, some of them a four-day walk from the nearest distribution centre, can be three times as expensive as regular aid missions, he said.
UN agencies have launched an emergency appeal for $415 million, including $128 million in food-related needs. That number is expected to rise when authorities have calculated the full scale of the destruction.
The quake on April 25 killed more than 7,500 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
HARVEST PROBLEMS
As well as killing thousands and affecting an estimated 8 million Nepalis, the quake ravaged food supplies in parts of the mountainous, landlocked country.
In the worst-hit areas, more than 60 per cent of households have lost most or all their farm assets, a spokesman for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.
Nepal was "suffering chronic food insecurity" even before the quake, the FAO's Jeff Tschirley told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The destruction of crops and deaths of thousands of livestock as a result of the quake means that even if hunger is alleviated this year, it could become severe in 2016, he said.
Many farmers will be unable to plant their next crop before the rainy season in June, and getting seeds, fertilizer and new plough animals into rural areas will be difficult, Tschirley said.
Nepal's agriculture ministry is still trying to assess the scale of the damage to food supplies, and is likely to make more specific requests for outside help in the coming weeks, said Lakshmi Moola, an official with the International Fund for Agriculture Development, the UN agriculture bank.
"In monetary terms, they still don't know the scale of the losses," Moola told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
© Thomson Reuters 2015
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