Tsunami-affected fishing communities to continue getting aid

Somali coastal communities that lost their livelihoods to the tsunami in December will continue to receive aid from World Food Programme (WFP) until the next fishing season starts in October, the WFP country director, Robert Hauser, has said.

"The assistance that we have provided so far is purely survival assistance for the population because they have lost their livelihoods, their means of income and they have lost their fishing gear," Hauser told IRIN in an interview on 3 March.

"We will sustain this assistance until the new fishing season starts in October," he added.

He expressed hope that other agencies, donors and the international community in general would rebuild the infrastructure and help those affected by the tsunami to acquire new fishing gear so that they could become self-reliant again.

WFP, he added, had enough funds to sustain the tsunami relief effort and donors were continuing to respond to the appeal for money to run other longer-term operations throughout the rest of Somalia.

"The good thing for Somalia is also that despite the tsunami, the funding for the normal programme has also not suffered," said Hauser.

"As far as the reconstruction is concerned, we have asked our people in the field and I know they are doing it - to design - together with the local community projects to, for example, build roads - to rebuild some of the buildings that were destroyed," he said. "We can only do it as food-for-work programme because we do not have money."

Hauser said that in other drought-affected areas, especially the Sool and Sanaag regions in the north, the food security situation had not improved despite the recent rainfall, because of environmental degradation.

"The drought in Sool and Sanaag and some other areas has created an extremely bad situation in that it has contributed greatly to the desertification in that area and has generated peoples' movement to other areas that were extremely fragile before," Hauser said.

"Suddenly populations in very fragile areas have doubled and that continues creating an environmental stress to say the least," he continued. "The habit of cutting the bushes and trees and converting them into charcoal will make Somalia a sand-dune desert in a couple of years.

He named the areas that were of great concern as Sool and Sanaag, Togdheer and the stretch in Puntland from Bari down to Mudug.

"I think, though, that the rains have helped a number of people," Hauser said. "My estimates would be that between 600,000 and 800,000 people [were in need of aid] with the trend going down at the moment."