More emergency food to drought victims in PNG

Transcript

The emergency response co-ordinator for CARE Australia in Papua New Guinea says tens of thousands of people still need urgent food supplies.

Much of the Highlands, along with other parts of PNG, suffered badly from 8 months of severe drought brought by EL Nino from the second half of last year.

CARE's Blossom Gilmour is in Enga in the Highlands where the latest distribution of rice is now underway.

She spoke with Don Wiseman.

BLOSSOM GILMOUR: Well even though the rain's started, it takes a very long time for people's gardens to come back. So after a major dry period, in the areas that are up above 2000 metres, it takes about nine months for their staple crops to come back. So that will be into September and October this year before people are returning to a more normal situation in terms of their diet.

DON WISEMAN: At this point how many people, across the highlands particularly I guess, remain affected by impact of the El Nino system?

BG: The people who are living in the very high altitude locations, so it's about 120,000 people are living above 2000 metres and sp they're the ones whose gardens are slower to recover from long dry periods.

DW: And is it difficult for them or just inconvenient? How bad is it?

BG: Well they do have some food. So they do have leafy green vegetables, things like fern greens and pumpkin tips and they have pumpkins. There's a fair bit of pumpkin and a fair bit of cabbage. But as you can imagine, eating only cabbage and pumpkin as your primary calorie sources is not a very diverse diet, not a very interesting diet and not very nutritious. And they are lacking the staple core starches. So they have no carbohydrates in their diet right now. So people feel hungry and they're not getting the nutrition they need.

DW: In terms of the gardens that you say should be back producing by September, how are they looking now?

BG: They look gorgeous. There's lots of vines for the tuber, so they rely on the tuber - the sweet potato - here. And the vines look fantastic, it looks really healthy. Unfortunately because there was a lot of extra nitrogen in the soil at the end of the dry season, when you pull up the tubers there's nothing there. So it is anticipated that the first crop of sweet potato will be quite weak, if not a crop failure. So we're hoping that they'll get some of the staples but there is chance that there will actually be a prolonged hungry season, because the first crops won't come back at the same level they're expecting. So even though it looks really health levels, we don't know what's under the ground.

DW: This food distribution you're doing is in association with the world food programme, is that right?

BG: Yes, the world food programme is bringing the food out here for us, and putting into warehouses, and CARE is taking care of what's called 'the last mile'. So actually taking it out to the people, doing the household registration, making sure that single female headed households, people living with disabilities, the elderly are prioritised and making sure they're taken care of first. So making sure all the community level work is done and distribution is done in a fair and equitable level.

DW: When you turn up at houses, in terms of a food supply, how long will that last a typical household?

BG: Right now we're distributing a six week supply of rice for a household.

DW: And when you turn up with it, people are happy to see it?

BG: Oh absolutely, yesterday was the first day of distribution. We're just getting started. We've been doing registration up in upper Enga for the last seven or eight days, yesterday was the first distribution. People were incredibly welcoming, lots of people in tears saying 'thank you for finally helping us'.