UN relief chief says progress is being made in reconstruction, but warns there is still a lot to do

Posted on July 29, 2008
Filed Under Burma news |

John Holmes, the UN's Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator

A degree of normality has returned to some areas affected by Cyclone Nargis says John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

Speaking in New York after returning from a three day visit to the affected area, he said, “”Quite a lot of progress has been made since I was last there two months ago – a lot of houses have been repaired since we were last there, a lot of work has been done on schools and clinics to try and get them back into better shape, and it was possible to see a lot of activity going on in the fields.”

He said the UN and other aid organisations had now managed to reach virtually everyone with some kind of aid.

But, he warned there was still much work to be done. In particular, he said more remote areas were still very hard to reach. “There’s still a lot to do to make the relief operation a lasting success – to reach everybody with all that they need for a sustained period,” he said.

Holmes said the main challenge for the next few months is to ensure a more systematic pipeline of aid particularly to people, in the more remote areas. He added that people there will need quite a lot of help for some time to come.

Holmes also said he raised with the junta the issue of Burma’s foreign currency controls which had resulted in a loss of between 15 to 25 percent on US dollars changed into Burmese kyat (see: 20% of donations lost to Burma’s currency controls)

Holmes said t about a third of the $200 million so far spent by UN agencies in Myanmar had been used on buying local products and services, which meant that approximately $10 million had been lost on the trades.

He said, “”This clearly is a significant problem in terms of the loss that is made on the exchange of the dollar – that’s why we’ve raised it with the Government now. We hope that they will work with us to try to find a practical solution, which is what they said they would do, and we are pressing them very hard to do that.”