Transcript
MIKE BOURKE: What's happening at the moment is that a lot of people are displaced, they're very, very afraid. There's lots of rumours going around that Mt Bosavi's about to erupt and a lot of the false rumours of rivers running with blood. And people are moving. They're moving somtimes to airstrips, sometimes elsewhere. So a lot of people are now concentrated in certain areas where they will not have a lot of food. Not so much in the Highlands themselves but particularly on what's known as the great Papuan plateau which is about 300metres to 600meters above sea level and even lower than that, the population density is quite low. So if a thousand people or 500 people turn up it really puts a lot of pressure on the local food supply. So there's a lot of pressure on food supply at the moment. So one of the most urgent things for where these people have moved, where you've got a thousand people or two thousand people all sitting on an airstrip or sitting somewhere because they're scared to be at home, is they'll need food, and preferably better quality food, not just rice, thye'll need some high protein, tinned fish or something. They need water sometimes, and they need medical help. That's the urgent immediate need right now for the people who've been displaced.
JENNY MEYER: What about the fact that a lot of their crop gardens have actually been completely wiped out, how long will it take them to re-establish more gardens do you think that can actually produce food for them?
MB: It's not clear what proportion of the land has been wiped out. There a lot of spectacular looking images on social media but you know you can take a photograph and it looks terrible and of course it is terrible, but it might just wipe out the garden of ten families. I'd make the contrast here with what happens in a big drought. What happened in 1997/98 or 2015/16 in a big drought you have hundreds of thousands of people in fact millions of people who are short of food. So my sense at the moment is that, yes it's terrible for those individual households or group of households who have lost their bananas and sweet potato and what have you, the overall impact will not be, will be nowhere as great in fact in terms of loss of gardens as what we saw in 2015 and '16 or in '1997/98. What you're seeing at the moment is a huge response by the government of Papua New Guinea, by different agencies, certainly by the private sector and certainly by the international donors, the United Nations. And it is quite a contrast with what happened in '15/16 with the drought because the drought was a slow moving thing. The other thing I'd say at the moment, the thing that would help people establish their crops more quickly than anything else is to have planting material of maize or corn. Because in the lowlands you can eat that in 90 days, have high quality food in 90 days or even at higher altitude it's only 100 or 110 days. And it's high quality food and it's fast and everyone eats it. The issue in Papua New Guinea is that there's not large quantities of seed available. But that's the most urgent single need right now for people who have lost their crops or indeed those who have been displaced and moving to other villages.
JM: What about the very young and the elderly, do you think they're particulaly vulnerable in this sort of situation in terms of illness and their ongoing health?
MB: They are and the young in this context means the under fives and the elderly means over forty. So in these remote areas to put it colloquially men don't have grey beards, in other words people die in their 40s and 50s hardly anyone lives into their 60s. Now I'm not talking about the Central Highlands or the coast, I'm talking about these remote inland areas where this earthquake struck at the moment, post an episode like this, post a disaster with the earthquake, it is going to be the young and the older people who are very vulnerable. There's no doubt about that, there's a lot of evidence to show that.
