The UN said on Tuesday that aid for Pakistan's flood victims would focus on the survival needs of six million people, as it prepared to ramp up the relief effort with an international appeal for funds. "We are focusing for now on six million people who are in need of direct humanitarian assistance, meaning that they need it to survive," said Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Byrs said the figure of 14 million affected was a broader measure given by Pakistani authorities that included the direct and indirect impact of the country's worst flooding for living memory, extending from the homeless to longer term damage such as crop losses or loss of earnings. UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes will launch the international appeal for funds in New York on Wednesday, along with Pakistani officials, Byrs said.
She told AFP that the number of victims targeted by the appeal had yet to be finalised. But it is likely to be among one of the biggest relief efforts in the UN's history in terms of the number of people in need. OCHA officials have said the disaster eclipsed the scale of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti put together. Byrs said about five million people were targeted by aid in the Indian Ocean tsunami, while the estimated 300,000 homes destroyed in Pakistan rivalled the numbers seen in Haiti's devastating quake.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon indicated on Monday that the UN would ask donor nations for several hundred million dollars. The huge scale of the devastation wrought by monsoon rains from the north to the south of Pakistan was testing aid agencies "to their limits," said Andre Mahecic, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He said Afghan refugees were also caught up in the disaster, with 1.4 million of the 1.7 million registered Afghans in Pakistan living on worst hit areas.
The aid challenge was amplified by areas that are still cut off or only reached by donkey, security concerns in some areas, helicopters repeatedly grounded by bad weather, roads that have been swept away, as well as the sheer numbers in need of shelter, food, and clean water, relief officials said.
"We're covering a limited extent at this point, so we think that relief operations should be massively scaled up," said UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) spokesman Marco Jimenez. The World Food Programme said it had been able to deliver one-month food rations nearly 340,000 people so far.
"We're expecting that about two million people will likely need help for at least three months," at a cost of about 150 million dollars for food aid deliveries alone. The World Health Organisation said medical supplies were deployed for 800,000 people over the coming month, while 5,000 cases of diarrhoeal illnesses were treated, but the international response so far was "insufficient." "Many districts have no access to medical care. The number one problem remains access to clean water," said WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib.