What Do You Think?

[joycesmith]

Yea right . . . if the supplies gets distributed by any level of the Philippine government the only ones that will get anything are the officials, their buddies, and the groups that will sell the supplies to the people of the various regions.


copied from:

http://news.ph.msn.com/regional/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4128541

By Agence France-Presse, Updated: 6/4/2010

Red Cross comes to aid of drought-hit Philippines

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Friday it will extend its food and farm aid programme in the Philippines to the country's drought-hit northern highlands.

The Red Cross said more than 7,000 families are to get 175 tonnes of rice, fish paste and cooking oil, while 2,400 families will get corn seeds and fertilisers to replace crops wiped out by the El Nino dry spell.

"This is an exceptional situation," Red Cross spokeswoman Anastasya Isyuk told AFP.

She stressed that the project in Ifugao province would not affect the aid group's primary focus of helping Filipinos displaced by internal conflict mainly in the south, which faces a decades-old Muslim separatist insurgency.

The drought, caused by cyclical warming of the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean, has devastated the Ifugao rice terraces, paddies carved from mountainsides 5,000 years ago that are among the country's top tourist draws.

But Isyuk said the focus of the Red Cross aid would be Aguinaldo and Alfonso Lista, two towns of relatively lower elevation that were even worse hit. The aid package covers practically their entire populations.

"We saw the devastation brought about by El Nino in various parts of the country, especially in the Ifugao (towns) where many residents heavily depend on rain-fed farming," Red Cross official Henri Maindiaux said in a statement.

"After weeks of assessment, we decided to provide both immediate and continuing assistance through food and agricultural inputs."

Philippine farm output fell 2.84 percent from a year earlier in the three months to March due to El Nino, the agriculture department has said.

The weather service said normal rainfall levels are expected to return this month.