A senior United Nations official said on Tuesday there are not enough tents in the world to protect refugees from the coming winter after the October 8 earthquake in South Asia.
Tents are a priority item with about three million people made homeless, with many of them forced to live in the open in plummeting temperatures in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and parts of North West Frontier province.
”It is fair to say the indication is that there are not enough tents in the world available to support the requirements,” said Andrew MacLeod, chief operations officer in the UN emergency response centre in Islamabad.
Pakistan on Tuesday banned all exports of tents, a day after it said it would even buy tents from its rival India.
The UN has said it has already exhausted the supply of the vital items in Pakistan, which is itself the world’s biggest producer of so-called winterised tents.
”If there is another emergency in the next few months [elsewhere in the world], it will be very difficult. So, that is a huge issue right now,” UN spokesperson Amanda Pitt said.
Pitt said it is impossible to give a definitive figure on how many tents are needed, but said authorities are working on a homeless figure of between 2,8-million and 3,2-million, with an average of five members per family.
About 37 000 tents had been delivered by Monday night, the Pakistani government has contributed a further 100 000, and another 150 000 are ”in the pipeline, but still we believe that it is not going to be enough”, she said.
Scramble for shelter
Relief agencies are scrambling to find warm tents from wherever they can before snows begin to fall on the devastated mountain villages of Kashmir and northern Pakistan, the spokesperson said.
”We are trying to get them from everywhere. Neighbouring countries are key … and China, Korea, Singapore, the Middle East, everywhere,” Pitt said.
Pakistan’s disaster-response chief, Major General Farooq Ahmad Khan, said on Tuesday the country has banned the export of tents as it needs as much makeshift shelter as possible.
Khan said there are 37 tent-making factories in Punjab, the richest and most populous of Pakistan’s four provinces, capable of producing 75 000 tents a day, but that he is not sure all are appropriate for the Himalayan winter.
Pakistan also appealed for bigger tents to use as temporary schools in the coming months. Hundreds of schools collapsed in the quake, killing thousands of children.
Officials have said the disaster, in which at least 54 000 people died in Pakistan and 1 300 in India, was worse than the 2004 Asian tsunami because of the difficult terrain and the inhospitable climate.
Helicopters, trucks and donkeys have struggled to get enough tents, blankets and food to cold and hungry survivors since the 7,6-magnitude quake.
”The whole thing here is a nightmare. I know it sounds dramatic to say this, but it really is a case of nature overwhelming man,” Pitt said.
”It is just phenomenal; there are whole villages that are not accessible at the best of times. Getting supplies into them is a superhuman effort,” she said.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry said on Monday it is importing tents from rival India on an urgent basis. India has already sent three consignments of aid, the latest of which arrived by train on Monday. — Sapa-AFP