Massive and urgent increase in quake support needed - UN

The United Nations called on Wednesday for a massive and urgent increase in donor commitment to help the survivors of the South Asian earthquake that has killed at least 79,000 people, according to Pakistani authorities. "We need more resources to save 2 million to 3 million lives and we need much more resources in the next few days,” Jan Egeland, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said. The call came as the United Nations on Wednesday raised its appeal for donations for the millions of survivors to almost US $550 million as a donor conference in Geneva was set to begin. The UN's Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, in Geneva to lend weight to the appeal, underlined the urgency of the crisis in northern Pakistan, urging prevention a new humanitarian disaster with the onset of winter. "While no one today could have had the power to prevent the earthquake from happening, we do have the power to stop the next wave: the deaths and despair caused by freezing temperatures and disease, by lack of shelter, food and water," Annan told the aid conference in Geneva. So far, donors have been slow to respond to the fund-raising appeals. The UN, which is spearheading international relief efforts, has only received a third of the $312 million it had initially requested. In comparison, the UN flash appeal after last December's tsunami was more than 80 percent funded within 10 days of the disaster. Separately, the Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies doubled its own aid appeal to $117 million, saying thousands of earthquake survivors faced death unless they urgently received winterised tents and blankets. Although 200,000 tents are already in the pipeline, a further 500,000 winterised tents are needed along with blankets, stoves and fuel, aid workers have estimated. Egeland spoke of a deadline, in the grimmest sense, with 3.3 million people still homeless, 800,000 without any shelter and only about three weeks left to reach them before they are cut off by snow. "We have too little. WFP [the World Food Programme] is less than 10 percent funded. We have received too little money too late," he said. In the quake zone, survivors, hundreds of thousands of whom have received no assistance 18 days after the massive quake, were shaken from their sleep on Wednesday by four aftershocks measuring up to 5.2 on the Richter scale, the latest of more than 950 such shocks since the original 7.6-magnitude quake on 8 October. On top of the enormous logistical problems involved in delivering aid to the isolated region, bad weather grounded relief helicopters and slowed road convoys on Wednesday. "Governments meeting in Geneva today must put their hands in their pockets and pay their fair share. The public will be shocked that so many rich governments have given so little," said Phil Bloomer, policy director of international aid agency Oxfam. Oxfam also said the United States, Germany, Italy and Japan had given less than one-fifth of their fare share calculated according to the relative size of their economy as a proportion of the total from major industrialised countries.