The World Food Programme (WFP), under its Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation (PRRO) for 2006, will spend around $67 million to provide training to men and women from earthquake affected areas in different skills for their livelihood earners.
These people would be trained in interlocking bricks, crushed stones, sapling and other products to meet market demand as an alternative source of sustainable income, said the PRRO 2006-08 document approved by the WFP board.
These projects will focus on households that rely on agriculture for their main source of income and have few animals and less than 0.7 hacters of cultivatable land.
The two main activities will produce crushed rock and stone blocks for building and establishment of households and community nurseries. According to WFP before disaster the affected areas were already classified a low-income, food-deficit region with high infant mortality rate.
The human development index for the affected districts of Kohistan, Shangla, Batagram and Mansehra in North-West Frontier Province averaged 0.371 compared with 0.541 for Pakistan as a whole, placing them far below the national average in terms of economic growth, health, education and quality of life.
In both affected areas of NWFP and AJK the life expectancy is 51 years, 10 years less than the national average. In terms of availability, access and consumption of food and overall food security, the affected districts were amongst the lowest in the country before earthquake, WFP said, quoting the figures of sustainable development policy institute Islamabad.
According to the WFP, the earthquake and aftershocks resulted in landslides, soil destabilisation and erosion across 30,000 kilometers mountainous terrain. Food support for training in establishing small scale and community nurseries, including soil preparation, seed propagation, maintenance and marketing, will help increase supply while giving impoverished small landholders an alternative sustainable source of income, it said.
Under this component, food insecure small landholders will receive locally manufactured all-weather greenhouses that can produce 2,000 saplings in three rotations per year, contributing to food security by enabling production of high valued apricots, apples, plums, peaches, walnuts and pistachio nuts, spinach, turnips, radishes and onions.
The larger greenhouses of 30,000 unit capacity will be provided for communities and women's associations, which will receive three months' training and food support for six to seven months for two crops.
They will propagate a variety of pine and fruit or net trees that will be sold to the department of forestry, NGOs and at least three multinational companies involved in large scale reforestation programmes and will also propagate deep rooted non-edible plants for aerial broadcast planting on slide-prone mountain slops.
In return for the greenhouses, food support and training, project participants will be required to repay the project 25 percent of their first crop for use in reforestation and erosion control activities.
On the completion of the training and a second crop food will be withdrawn and the household and community nurseries will operate as independent enterprises. Tree planting, maintenance and associated costs will be borne by individuals and agencies purchasing nursery outputs.
Under the ongoing two-year PRRO support to pre-primary and primary school children, and take home rations for girls in middle school programmes were also under way.
Under the programme first 450,000 students will be benefiting during 2006 by getting dry rations of biscuits and dates. Boys and girls in primary and grades 1-5 and pre-primary classes for siblings who accompany primary school children to the same institution were getting these commodities on daily basis. In 2007 about 525,000 children will benefit from this programme.
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