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- 10/21/08: Remarks by Henrietta Fore, Administrator, USAID and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance at the White House Development Summit
- 10/08/08: Remarks by Henrietta Fore, USAID Administrator and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance at The President's Freedom Agenda
- 10/01/08: Remarks by Henrietta H. Fore, Administrator, USAID and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, at the Ceremony Marking the Full Operational Capacity of Africa Command (AFRICOM)
- 09/25/08: Remarks by Henrietta H. Fore, Administrator, USAID and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, at 2008 Millennium Development Goal Malaria Summit, New York - "U.S. Leadership in the Fight Against Malaria"
- 09/22/08: Remarks by Henrietta H. Fore, Administrator, USAID and Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, at the White House Symposium on Advancing Global Literacy - "U.S. Commitment to Advancing Global Literacy"
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Remarks by Andrew Natsios, USAID Administrator
Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs
and Major General Paul Patrick, USA
Pakistan Earthquake Relief Effort
United Nations
Geneva, Switzerland
October 26, 2005
AMBASSADOR KEVIN E. MOLEY: Thank you for joining us. I am Ambassador Kevin Moley from the United States Mission Geneva and I am very pleased to have three distinguished high ranking American officials to brief on the Pakistan relief effort. First will be the administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios. Then our Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, Kristen Silverberg. And then from the Department of Defense, Major General Paul Patrick, representing the joint chiefs of staff. Andrew.
MR. NATSIOS: Thank you very much. I want to elaborate on some of the comments I made about the more innovative approach we are going to take to this emergency because the impression the world has is that emergency response is basically about moving commodities around. You see the ships arriving, and the planes arriving with tents and that sort of thing.
But the fact is, emergency response, in terms of the first principle of response, is to restore people's coping mechanisms to provide for themselves. And so we should see our relief efforts as facilitating that process as opposed to just moving commodities around, even though the commodities are very important. And so, for example, in the area of shelter, which is the crisis we face right now given that in the next few weeks the passes will fill up with snow into some village areas and they will be inaccessible for the rest of the winter. So we are working, of course, with all of the other donors, and the U.N. agencies and the NGOs to access as many tents as possible. And about 112,000 tents have been distributed totally by both the government of Pakistan and the international community and another 200,000 tents are in the pipeline on-order and about to arrive. However that leaves a gap of 88,000 tents. And the question of course is what we do about this. So let me mention what we are going to be doing.
The first is that we will look to see how many of the dwellings of homes have at least one room that is still capable of being lived in. Maybe the rest of the house is destroyed, but many homes are partially destroyed. And what we will attempt to do - we have done this in a couple of emergencies and it does work, particularly in cold climates - is to make sure there is one warm room in each of the partially destroyed homes, and if it means repairing the roof of the house to make sure it gets through the winter, then that is what we will do. So in other words the first step will be to restore existing dwellings, because people actually according to all the empirical evidence we have from previous emergencies, is that people like to stay near their homes and their property. There is a fear among the people in these villages that if they leave, they will loose their land. There are questions of land tenure in Pakistan. And we need to respect the fears of the people and the values of the community. We don't want to force them to leave, or encourage them to leave when in fact they are nervous about their land tenure, because land is the most important thing they own.
So by helping to facilitate the repair of partially destroyed buildings, homes, before the winter arrives, we can get some people taken care off. The second thing we are going to do is this. The evidence is that the second coping mechanism people use in emergencies, particularly natural disasters, is to move in with their extended families in housing units that may be intact, in a neighboring village, in a neighboring city, in the lowland areas, and so we will provide voucher-system like support to extended families that take in relatives who come from these affected areas who were displaced by the complete destruction of their homes. So in other words our idea is to resettle people in the homes of their relatives. And that will put stress on the extended families in terms of food supply, and bedding material, and that is the kind of thing we want to support.
The third option is to use communal facilities. Sometimes you can find market buildings, there are private businesses, there are sometimes town and city halls that can be used. We did this in Bosnia with some success, particularly to get people through a winter, because these winters are very rough. And tenting material may not even be adequate, particularly some of the tents that are arriving. And then finally we will encourage people by trying to recruit families that are not extended families but that are willing to take people in if they were provide some kind of an encouragement financially, a voucher, that will allow them to take families in even if they are not related to them. So we have been discussing this with the NGOs and with the donor community and it is one approach which I think will work.
The other thing we are going to try to do, in fact we are beginning already working with the NGOs and the Pakistani government, is to begin to get people back to work by providing daily wages for the bread winners who are in good physical condition to begin the cleanup operation. We want mass employment programs that will allow U.S. to begin to clear the rubble away, to facilitate the reconstruction process, but also, primarily to increase family incomes because these families now don't have jobs, they don't have a source of income. It is also a kind of therapeutic intervention, because when people are not working and they go through what they have lost, they get depressed. And one thing we have noticed in other emergencies is that if you keep people active it does help the healing process psychologically because there is a lot of trauma involved in these emergencies.
And the final thing we are doing is rather than importing relief goods from the outside, what we are doing is we are going to work through the NGO community to give vouchers to people whose homes were destroyed and they can go to the markets, local markets in their communities which we are trying to reestablish, and there will be a list of approved commodities like bedding materials and blankets and pots and pans and heating equipment, silverware to eat with. They will be able to buy these things and then the merchants take the voucher and return it to the NGO and get paid for the amount of money. We have done this successfully in a couple of other instances and it has been a very good intervention. What it does is it encourages the reestablishment of markets. It encourages local production, local purchase, and the local marketing systems, and uses informal means of transportation to get goods there because many of the public means now are clogged up with getting people who are from remote areas and moving in the internationally donated supplies. What we are trying to do is supplement informal markets and informal mechanisms with the formal international relief system. Because if we don't do both of these things, we are not going to meet our targets. Those are some of the approaches we are taking. Kristen.
MS. SILVERBERG: Thanks, I'll just add a couple of quick points to the Administrator's. The first is to talk about all of the U.S. efforts on the emergency preparedness side, the things that we do in advance of emergencies to make sure that the international community, U.S. government, the U.N. agencies involved in humanitarian response, NGOs and others are well prepared to respond to any crisis. One critical part of our preparedness is to make sure that we support the U.N. agencies that are involved in all of these efforts.
To give you some examples of the kinds of support the U.S. provides as part of our regular support of the UN, we are the largest funder of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees: we provide about $320 million annually, which in this emergency is providing relief supplies, including tents, blankets and other things. We are the largest funder of the World Food Program - in fact, we provide more than half of the World Food Program budget. WFP provides food aid to earthquake victims and they are also the custodian of a U.N. joint logistics center, which has a very important role in helping to make sure that all of the U.N. logistics efforts are coordinated. I had a meeting with the World Food Program officials in charge of logistics in Rome, on my way here, to talk about ways we can further support their efforts. We are the largest funder of UNICEF: we provided about $119 million in 2004. UNICEF is providing blankets and nutritional biscuits, and also works to protect children from exploitation following a crisis. We are the largest funder of the International Committee of the Red Cross: we provide about $156 million, which is providing a wide range of relief and medical activities. And we also provide substantial funding to OCHA, WHO, and UNDP, which are all involved in the effort.
I would make a final point that not only the U.S. government, but also the U.S. private sector is involved in supporting emergency preparedness. One quick example is Price Waterhouse Cooper's role in helping the U.N. agencies build their financial tracking capacity.
On that point, the second thing I want to highlight is the importance of private sector participation in emergency relief, which is something we saw very visibly as part of our tsunami response. We are welcoming and encouraging and will be working in the future to further encourage charitable organizations and our corporate partners to fully participate in the emergency response. Just to give you a few examples, USAID and Procter & Gamble have announced a public-private alliance to provide safe drinking water. I have something to show and tell: these are packets that Procter & Gamble is providing in the earthquake zone to help purify water. They are providing 5.5 million of these. So they should provide safe drinking water for more than 50,000 households over three months. It is enormously important in helping to save lives. Pfizer is donating a million dollars to relief organizations and 5 million in medical supplies. And there are many other examples of corporate and charitable participation.
With that, I will introduce General Patrick.
GEN PATRICK: Thank you very much. I would like to say that I am here today on behalf of General Peter Pace, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I am here to outline the U.S. military support in some more detail to you as concerns the Pakistan earthquake relief.
I would like to say initially that we deeply value Pakistan's long-standing friendship with the United States and Pakistan's unwavering support of the United States in the global war on terrorism. The Pakistan and U.S. military are working together as friendly soldiers in a friendly nation. We are supporting the government of Pakistan with their relief efforts, and we will continue to supplement the capabilities that we are currently making available.
The U.S. military support to the Pakistan earthquake relief is a global effort involving coordination between U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Transportation Command in the continental United States; U.S. Central Command in southwestern Asia; U.S. European Command; and U.S. Pacific Command. The military personnel come from all branches of service (Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines) as well as all components (active forces, our National Guard, and Reserve).
The U.S. military response was immediate. For example, a C-17 from Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan arrived in Islamabad with humanitarian relief supplies already on 9 October. Eight helicopters from Combined Forces Command Afghanistan were operational in the affected area by 10 October. This immediate response and its magnitude demonstrate the depth, resilience, agility, flexibility and compassion of our armed forces as we, in cooperation with other U.S. government entities such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, work together with, first and foremost, the Pakistan government and military, as well as with our allies, the UN, NGOs and other donor nations to get aid and assistance quickly and unbureaucratically to the victims in the remote areas of northern Pakistan.
This quick response and the magnitude of U.S. military support is all the more significant considering that the U.S. military is simultaneously engaged in contingency operations in the global war on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as providing domestic disaster relief support in the continental United States as well as in Central America following Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma.
Thank you.
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