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Food aid to Iraq continues unabated

Efforts to move much needed food aid through the Habur gate, the main border crossing point along Turkey's 352-km border with Iraq, continue to reap impressive results. "With the huge cargoes of wheat on our doorstop, we anticipate escalating our dispatches by some 40 percent over and above the levels we have achieved up to now on the Turkey corridor," Heather Hill, a spokeswoman for the World Food Programme (WFP), told IRIN in the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir on Thursday. Carl Hogan, a field officer for the UN Joint Logistics Centre (UNJLC) in Turkey who had just returned from an assessment of the border gate at Habur, told IRIN from the capital, Ankara, that the flow of vitally needed assistance was proceeding smoothly. The UNJLC mission to the border town of Silopi, in consultation with Turkish authorities, noted that the Habur gate had the capacity to manage comfortably the volumes of humanitarian aid going through. The gate has a daily capacity for 3,000 trucks, and only a fraction of it was being used currently, Hogan explained. Turkish authorities reportedly do not foresee a need to switch over to a 24-hour system unless the number of vehicles passing per day exceeds 1,000. "The border gate is working very well, and full credit must be given to the Turkish authorities for rising to the task," Hogan said. "The gate is operating well below capacity, and the authorities at the gate have impressive contingency plans in place for not only an increase in the number of humanitarian vehicles but also the lifting of sanctions as and when it occurs." According to WFP's latest figures, some 2,271 trucks carrying 46,500 mt of assorted commodities had been dispatched to Iraq from Turkey since WFP's first trucks crossed the border on 29 March. This is roughly the amount needed to feed the 3.6 million people of northern Iraq for one month under the public distribution system within the framework of the UN mandated Oil-for-Food Programme (OFFP). On 26 April alone, a record 238 trucks crossed over in a single day. "This is way above the daily 150 we have been averaging over the previous two weeks," Hill noted. Meanwhile, the UN in Ankara reported earlier this week that the discharge of the US wheat aboard the Yellow Rose, which docked in the southeastern Turkish port city of Mersin last week, had been completed. The 28,500 mt of wheat - the largest in-kind contribution to the WFP emergency effort in Iraq - will be stored temporarily in a warehouse until customs procedures and milling of the wheat can begin later this week. Additionally, offloading of the Petros, a Russian-registered ship carrying 37,000 mt of Russian wheat, commenced on Tuesday. The vessel, under a Greek flag, had been waiting for over a month to deliver the wheat, which had been purchased under an old contract from the OFFP. The wheat will go into a bonded warehouse until negotiations on the status of these OFFP contracts have been completed. A third ship is reportedly on the way. Hill noted that the food agency would soon begin a major milling effort inside Turkey to maintain the levels of food it had been transporting to Iraq over the past two weeks. "The mills will produce some 4,500 mt of wheat flour a day, which will increase the amount of food to be shipped to well above the 3,000 mt a day of food commodities that are being loaded on average onto trucks now," the WFP spokeswoman said. "So you see, these ships will make a significant impact on our flow of food into Iraq."

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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