Drought-hit Marshall Islands to get relief

Transcript

The remote regions of the Marshall Islands are receiving much needed relief this week after being hit by drought conditions since late last year. 

A government vessel loaded with tonnes of food supplies has headed out to 10 remote atolls and two outer islands to cater for the nearly 5,000 people there.

The supplies are paid for by the US Agency for International Development and the International Organization for Migration has assisted in the coordination.

Angela Saunders from the local IOM office told Koro Vaka'uta the relief comes after the Marshall Islands requested US help under their Compact of Free Association.

ANGELA SAUNDERS: What we're seeing now is the biggest impact on the agriculture which means we need to provide supplemental food assistance to beneficiaries, particularly in the outer islands where you're more reliant on your local produce not only for your daily caloric intake, but also as a means of subsitence living. So, copra harvesting and handicraft making. So the idea of the assitance is to be targetted to supplement and get people through the hard times until they get to pre-disaster levels, and at the same time not put small stores out of business and we've tried to do as much of our procurement through local vendors as possible to continue the healthy economy. 

KORO VAKA'UTA: What are those types of foodstuffs that's being made available through this relief distribution? 
 
AS: Through IOM implementing for US Aid we're providing rice, low-sodium mixed vegetables, a fruit substance [inaudible] water, and a little bit of cooking oil. There are canned goods that can be stored on the other islands where you don't have a lot of electricity.  

KV: In terms of the length of time that this assistance should last for, or is desgined for? 

AS: So it's designed so that we sort of have two categories; for the moderately affected locations they'll be receiving 120 days - or the equivalent of four months of supplemental food assistance - and the severely affected 210 days - or about seven months. At about the five month period we'll have a reassesment, so we'll have an expert come in again from the US government, an agricultural expert who will partner with an agricultural expert here in the Marshall Islands to go and check on the situation to make sure it's still needed and to make sure things are still recovering. So if we see that recovery is not happening as quickly as anticipated, we can then make adjustments. 

KV: Are the same issues being felt on Majuro? 

AS: In terms of the food assistance you don't see it as much here, so what we try and look for is an evidence base of how much people are eating off the land and relying on the land, and that's what we're substituting. So in the urban centres, people have jobs and other sources of income and they're not eating directly off the land as often. In Majuro, the government had a robust programme where they had 19 water distribution points across Majuro to ensure that everyone had access to water when we didn't have the rainfall. 

KV: In terms of these drought conditions, are they expect to continue to impact? What's the kind of forecast?

AS: The forecast that we've seen from NOAA (US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration) is that the rains are returning. We were very lucky, the projections for May were showing there would be less rainfall and we actually got a lot more than we've anticipated, so it really took the pressure off. I'm expecting that within the next couple of days that we'll see a new weather statement come out saying that some of the areas - the most northern - that are always dryer that will remain in a state of drought or exceptional drought, and the rest of the country in terms of immdiate water needs and conservation efforts will go back to more normal times. This drought, compared to other ones, is a bit different because of El Niño and the weather pattern, you could see it coming. We had a lot of predictions to work off of for planning purposes, and things are going quite closely to what NOAA predicted.