MANAGUA. The Operations Director
of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in its Rome headquarters,
Jean-Jacques Graisse, today approved a food assistance package, called
Emergency Operation 6286, for natural disaster mitigation in Nicaragua
and Honduras.
This Emergency Operation will benefit
180,000 people, (86,000 in Honduras and 93,720 in Nicaragua). Of
the 51% who are women and children, 19,080 are pregnant or breast-feeding
women and 32,400 are children under five years of age. This two-country
operation will benefit the campesino families affected by the extended
drought that hit both Nicaragua and Honduras, and then by the more recent
flooding, and consequently lost their crops.
This Emergency Operation mainly involves the distribution of 6,354 metric tons of maize, as well as legumes and vegetable cooking oil. This represents a total cost of US$5,091,125 for the WFP, and has a four-month implementation period.
"We are concerned about the food security of thousands of families that lost their crops in the first round of planting and also have no more seeds for the second round. This has been worsening the situation of their already deteriorated family economy, intensified by the constant exposure to adverse natural phenomena," said Francisco Roque Castro, WFP's Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean.
According to estimates of the Government of Honduras, the crop losses in the departments in the south of the country reached 90% of the area sown in some cases. The Ministry of Agriculture in Nicaragua reports that the crop losses in the 41 municipalities hardest hit by the drought are 53% of what was planted.
In mid-August, at the request of the Nicaraguan and Honduran governments, the WFP Representatives in both nations approved Immediate Response Assistance (IRA) operations for 111,000 people affected by the drought in the departments in the south of Honduras and the north of Nicaragua. Of those, 40,000 were in Honduras and 71,000 in Nicaragua.
The selection criteria for the beneficiaries will be peasant families with less than 2.5 hectares of land who have lost at least 50% of their crops, landless peasants whose economic income has been affected by the drought, and female heads of household.
The assistance modality for this Operation will be Food for Work. The families will work primarily on preparing the lands for the second-round planting and on soil conservation.
WFP is the United Nations' front-line agency in the fight against global hunger. In 1999, WFP fed more than 89 million people in 82 countries including most of the world's refugees and internally displaced people.
For more information contact:
Mr. Francisco Roque Castro, Regional
Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Tel. 2-662566
Olga Moraga Amador, Information Officer, Tel. 2-662566 Ext. 118
Trevor Rowe, WFP Chief Spokesperson, Rome, Tel. +1-202-422-3383 or 1-202-653-0010
e-mail: trevor.rowe@wfp.org
Heather Hill, WFP/Rome Tel. 00-39-06-6513-2533. e-mail: heather.hill@wfp.org