The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Sri Lanka welcomed a donation of US$4.6 million worth of rice and canned fish from Japan. The food will be used to feed 275,000 school children and 350,000 displaced and conflict-affected persons for three months in the most neglected areas of Sri Lanka.
Another disputed dam: After Baglihar, Kishanganga dam has embroiled India and Pakistan in a water dispute. Union minister of state for power Jairam Ramesh recently asked the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) to expedite work on the 330-mw Kishanganga power project in Jammu and Kashmir, citing that Pakistan is also constructing a power project on the Kishanganga river, called Neelum
The Asian Development Bank would provide a food assistance of $130 million as budget support for fiscal year 2008-09 to meet the government's food requirement under its social safety net programmes.
The current spike in food prices needs prompt reaction through various forms of social protection to avert poverty and hunger. Prices are soon likely to fall somewhat, but not to their previous levels.
About 70 per cent of Myanmar's hungry cyclone survivors remain without UN food aid more than two weeks after the disaster, forcing them to leave their villages, relief workers said on Monday. With the junta so far resisting calls to allow enough foreign disaster experts in to help direct the emergency effort, supplies are stacking up in Yangon with only small trucks to get aid to some two million needy people.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has started distributing food assistance to meet the immediate food needs of over 120,000 people affected by rodent attack in Rangamati and Bandarban districts. WFP will continue to assist 25,680 households of the 31 most affected unions of the seven severely affected upazilas for a period of four months, from May to August, 2008, said a press release.
News from Burma keeps getting worse: dire poverty, murderous repression and now cyclone Nargis has killed some 100,000 people. Disease and starvation could push the toll over the million mark as the country's despots, unbelievably, impede emergency aid while exporting rice - literally making a killing on inflated international prices. Burma is suffering even more than it might because it neglected its farms.
