WFP Regional Director for Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe Amir Abdullah said here on Tuesday that a critical window of just five weeks remains for WFP to pre-position food stocks to last six months for tens of thousands of people in the most remote areas that may be completely cut off with the onset of winter.
He said: "It must be clear to everybody that many people could die if we do not move more quickly. We must have much more funding, much sooner to gain as much speed as humanly possible in the face of gigantic logistics difficulties."
Abdullah said that WFP had been able to send nearly 3,000 tons of food, using planes, helicopters, trucks, rafts and pack mules to hundreds of thousands of affected people in one of the most rugged terrains in the world.
However, the UN food aid agency has so far received only about 13 percent of its $56 million food appeal targeted at about one million people until mid-April 2006.
He said that these figures would probably rise "once we conclude our rapid assessments". In addition, up to three times as much money could be needed for the land and air logistics operations that WFP is handling on behalf of almost all humanitarian agencies in Pakistan, Abdulla added.
He said that people stricken by grief and loss--and further traumatised by continuing aftershocks--were expressing frustration and anger over their inability to meet their basic needs. "In remote mountainous areas south-east of Muzaffarabad, angry residents expressed their concern about the slowness of relief," he said.
He said that road blockages were still preventing access to hundreds of thousands of people in the upper slopes, while landslides in various places such as Neelum Valley continue to pose a threat to the movement of people and vehicles. Helicopters are being used to move food into many villages in the valley and ferry out the injured.
He said: "Villagers from 11 communities came down from the mountains to Bheri village where distributions were being conducted by Pakistan Army. They wanted more food and desperately need shelter. On the way out of the valley, we took four injured people with us in the chopper," a WFP aid worker said.
The most seriously affected areas are in Azad Kashmir in the foothills of the Himalayas, where thousands of villages and isolated settlements are scattered over 28,000 square kilometres and most roads and bridges have been destroyed. The temperature has already fallen under the freezing point in many places at night, but in less than three weeks it will become much colder and many areas will become more difficult to reach.
Contributions to WFP's emergency operation to provide food to the earthquake survivors include Saudi Arabia ($3.3 million), Japan ($2.5 million), Australia ($1.5 million), Iceland ($75,000), private donations ($18,000) and the Faroe Islands ($16,000). Canada has contributed $4.7 million to the WFP's $23.6 million appeal for air support for the relief operation; other contributors to air support so far are the United States ($3.5 million) and Switzerland ($500,000).
According to a new release issued here on Tuesday, WFP's Executive Director James Moris, who is on a three-day visit to Japan, warned that time was running out to reach the hundreds of thousands in desperate need of assistance after the catastrophe and urged more donor support to the unprecedented aid challenge in Pakistan.
He said: "While we are grateful to donations received so far, the world is not responding as it should."