Relief effort gains strength

Less than forty-eight hours after the one hundred and forty-five mile an hour winds and eighteen foot storm surge of Hurricane Iris laid waste to a forty mile wide strip of southern Belize, a well co-ordinated relief effort is beginning to gather steam. NEMO, after what appeared to be a slow start, has quickly established staging areas in the Toledo and Stann Creek Districts. Using boats, trucks and helicopters, by newstime, even the remotest villages had at least begun to receive emergency food rations and more help is on the way, including building materials, medical supplies, tents, blankets and clothing. Individual donations are too numerous to mention, but among the larger contributions from abroad is a million Belize dollars in supplies from the Salvation Army, cash contributions of one hundred thousand dollars each from PAHO and UNICEF, two hundred thousand from UNDP, two hundred thousand from the U.S. government, two hundred thousand from CEDERA with an additional half million in loan funds. The Interamerican Development Bank has provided a hundred thousand dollars in emergency grant, but as in the case of Keith, will likely become the largest single source of loans for short and medium term recovery. And that recovery is likely to take some time. Three major pillars of the Belizean economy have been seriously damaged. The banana industry, provider of sixty-five million dollars in foreign exchange, has been one hundred percent destroyed. The farmed shrimp industry, expected to become Belize’s number one export in a few years, has been hit hard, while the south, particularly Placencia and Seine Bight, has been the country’s fastest growing area for tourism. For now, however, the focus is on more immediate relief.