Children face hunger as Vietnam braces for second storm

As typhoon-battered Vietnam battened down again today for the arrival of tropical storm Parma, months of food shortages were looming for the country’s children. A week after typhoon Ketsana hit Vietnam, destroying vast amounts of food crops, the south east Asian country was preparing for Parma to hit its northern coastline this evening (Wednesday). Last night the government last evacuated thousands of people from their homes and closed schools and colleges today, although it was expecting the Parma alert to be downgraded to less serious warning.

Typhoon Ketsana hit Vietnam hard, with officials confirming at least 99 people were killed, some by landslides and some by falling trees. And with much of this season’s crops lost and the next harvest not due until March or April, Vietnam’s children are now faced with months of food shortages.
Families’ crops have been devastated by the extreme weather and the stores of food they had were soaked through with rain and can’t be eaten. Children are most vulnerable when food is short and if they are malnourished they become even weaker and more likely to catch potentially fatal diseases such as diarrhoea.

Across the country, almost 36,000 hectares of rice crops have been damaged or flooded, along with almost 13,000 hectares of sugar cane and corn. Hundreds of thousands of pigs and chickens families raise to provide their children with vital protein were also killed when Ketsana hit. Also, if they were lucky enough to have their home still standing, many families possessions were washed away too, so not only did they have no food to eat, but nothing to cook and eat it with.

Aid workers are now handing out 1,000 family food aid packs to 5,000 people in affected areas. But the current amount of aid will not be enough to keep a fully-fledged reconstruction effort going, said Huynh Duc Truong, a Vietnamese aidworker who is helping to coordinate the reconstruction effort. 
“We know both the local aid organizations and the local government have very limited resources,” she told the United Nations news service. “We need much more help from foreign organisations.” Yet for many in Vietnam, the typhoon is just part of a larger pattern of suffering. 


Every year there are droughts, floods and storms. Many villages are rebuilt only to be destroyed again in five years. 
Floods and storms in Vietnam have become more powerful and frequent too in recent years, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 
Located in a typhoon zone, with a long coastline and extensive river deltas, the country is close to the top of the global disaster league table. On average, there are six to eight typhoons each year, the 2008 report said.