DAKAR, 6 August 2010 (IRIN) - UN agencies on 7 August will deliver food, seeds, fertilizer and other relief supplies to Guinea’s Labé region, where hundreds of families lost maize and vegetable crops in a hail storm.
Violent winds and hailstones "larger than eggs" flattened fields and damaged homes in the Kalan and Sannoun sub-prefectures on the night of 15 to 16 July, said Sannoun local leader El Hadji Amadou Diallo.
"In some villages the loss is 100 percent," said Mamadou Angelou Diallo of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who participated in a joint assessment of the situation by the UN, the government and NGOs.
It is the lean season, when people depend on maize and vegetable crops, and the storm hit an area where people rarely eat animal products for lack of means, the assessment report noted.
"I spent two days in one village; in the entire two days I didn't see a single family put a pot on the fire," OCHA's Diallo said.
Amadou Korka Tyobhoy Diallo, an agriculture expert who visited the affected villages the day after the storm, told IRIN: "Every plant is devastated. Trees are down everywhere. I saw dead snakes, dead birds. We won't even talk about the maize – it's all gone." He said orange and avocado trees were also wiped out.
The crops provide food as well as income. "This is going to hit people's revenue hard, especially for sending their children to school in the coming academic year," Nouhou Diallo, regional coordinator of the government humanitarian affairs service in Labé, told IRIN.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is facing shortages in Guinea and "had to borrow from other programmes" to send relief to the storm-hit communities, said WFP programme head Foday Turay.
WFP is providing food aid to 6,000 people, agency officials said. OCHA's Diallo said aid agencies were planning to provide help for schooling and primary healthcare, as family resources had been wiped out.
August 03, 2010, 03:34:31 AM