Food Insecurity Remains a Challenge for Cyclone Survivors

It’s already 2.30 in the afternoon, but 38-year old San San and her seven-member family still haven’t eaten their first meal of the day.

“I’m still looking for someone who will lend me some rice,” said the painfully thin woman, standing outside her makeshift hut in the village of Thagyar-hin-o in Dedaye Township.

Villager try to catch money thrown by donors during the opening ceremony of the first cyclone shelter in Pyar Pon Township in Burma, May 2, 2009. (Photo: Reuters)

The mother of five said that her family’s struggle to find enough food for even a single meal a day began earlier this year, when aid groups stopped distributing food in her village.

Before Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy delta in May 2008, San San’s husband and eldest son always managed to earn enough money to feed the family. Now, however, her son is only one breadwinner, and his meager income is not nearly enough to make ends meet.

There are thousands of families like San San’s living in cyclone-devastated areas of Burma’s Rangoon and Irrawaddy divisions, all living from hand to mouth and forced to skip at least one meal a day.

According to humanitarian agencies, the vast majority of cyclone survivors have yet to rebuild their lives more than one year after the disaster. For most, food security remains a pressing problem.

Nearly 140,000 people were killed and over two million more were left destitute when the category-four storm struck Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta in the first week of May last year.

“People are not likely to overcome food insecurity as long as their livelihoods are not back to normal,” said an official from Action Contre La Faim (ACF), an international nongovernmental organization assisting cyclone-affected people.

For the majority of cyclone survivors, he said, the key to food security is more assistance for the agriculture and small-scale livestock sectors of the local economy—a view that is shared by many in the aid community.

“Most of those who face food insecurity are landless people and day laborers, because there are very few job opportunities in both the agricultural and fishery sectors for them since the cyclone,” said an official from the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).

“So we should all have our focus mainly on the restoration of their livelihoods, which would help them to fight food insecurity in the long term on their own,” the WFP official added.

According to the Rapid Food Security Assessment (RFSA), released by the WFP earlier this year, food insecurity remains a serious concern in worst-hit areas such as the southern and western parts of the Irrawaddy delta.

The assessment also says that 51 percent of households in Laputta and Bogalay townships have been relying on food distribution, while just 25 percent said they have recovered. The vast majority—83 percent of sampled households—reported that they are now in debt for buying rice.

In an effort to address such food insecurity to some extent, humanitarian agencies have run food-for-work and cash-for-work programs in the worst-hit areas. Those programs mainly target poor households, female-headed households and landless laborers.

Though such programs may help targeted families in the short-term, there is still a desperate need for more international assistance in the long-term recovery effort, experts say.

According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, a three-year recovery plan remains severely under-funded. So far, just US $100 million has been pledged by the international community, out of the $691 million that is needed.