Shortages hurt quake relief

Nearly six weeks after the Oct. 8 earthquake, the urgency in a town like Balakot is palpable. Ninety percent of the 250,000 people who used to live here are either homeless or dead. Nearly 32,000 families now are either living in tents or in makeshift homes.

In the mountains a few thousand feet above, the peaks are already covered in snow. Time is running short.

But relief agencies cannot put their efforts into overdrive because of critical shortages of money and manpower in a year chock full of disasters competing for resources. The World Food Program, for instance, has an additional 14,000 metric tons of food in stock, but only enough funds to run helicopter air-drop operations for another two or three weeks. Meanwhile, UNICEF has only spent a fraction of the money it has been given because of staff shortages.

"We're six weeks into this, and I'm still trying to recruit staff," says Bill Fellows, regional water and sanitation adviser for UNICEF in Islamabad. "Look, this year you've got Darfur, and Liberia, and the tsunami. Maybe we've run out of capacity globally. I don't know if there are enough people in the world who do this sort of thing."

Both in terms of staff and money, the world response to the quake - a 7.6 temblor that killed more than 87,000 people and left an estimated 2.8 million homeless - has not been encouraging. Only about one-quarter of the relief funds, roughly $118 million, has been committed by donor nations. Donors arriving Saturday in Islamabad will be under pressure to produce actual contributions, not just pledges, to meet a needed $550 million in emergency relief, and an additional $5.2 billion in reconstruction costs.

At a press conference Wednesday, President Pervez Musharraf said, "I don't think Pakistan can do it alone.... If the tsunami or Katrina [survivors] can be assisted, why can't we be assisted? Is the world community lacking in conscience?"

In an Army-run camp in Balakot, Katherine Neumann, reporting officer for the French aid organization ACTED, says the earthquake was only the first part of the disaster. The second part is dealing with the ever-growing population of migrants who have lost their homes. And in Balakot, she says, this is pretty much everybody.

Thus far, her agency has given out plastic sheeting or tents to 1,500 families, tool kits to 900 families, and 900 blankets. Money isn't the problem for her agency, she says. "There hasn't been much coordination between WFP and UNOCHA [the United Nations Office for Coordinating Humanitarian Assistance]," she says.

Farhat Batool, a coordinator for the Lahore-based aid group, Pattan, echoes this sentiment. "It's important to have a proper system in place," she says. "As it is now, one family gets 20 blankets and another family gets nothing."

UN agencies have been making a big difference here.

Food: As of Nov. 8, the WFP has supplied 10,000 metric tons of food, enough to feed 815,000 people; the Pakistani Army has been distributing food to an additional 900,000. But without more money, the WFP airdrops will cease in the next few weeks.

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