We will provide food packs, vegetable seeds, root crops and hygiene kits to 7,500 families affected by Super Typhoon Goni in 12 villages in Albuera, Leyte and in Daraga, Albay. Although the villages in Leyte are not directly hit, they too are severely affected by strong winds and rain with vast agricultural lands damaged and harvest compromised. In Albay, we will focus on villages where we have local volunteers and partners with our previous response when Mayon Volcano erupted.
The province of Leyte is not directly hit by Super Typhoon Goni and hence this is the problem: support to small farmers who are also affected by severe tail winds and rain is not a priority. There is a need to provide assistance to them, in order for them to recover their farming livelihood by the provision of farm inputs. In Albay we will be providing relief and recovery assistance to those directly in the path of the Super typhoon.
Backyard vegetable gardening is easy to do, simple and most of the inputs are already present in the household. These are organic fertilizer, farming tools, water and sunshine. What is needed are vegetable seeds which is difficult to procure making gardening activity also problematic by poor families. We will provide high-quality vegetable and root crop seeds in order to solve this. In the short term, we will provide emergency food packs and hygiene kits.
During calamities such as this Super Typhoon, the need to secure food is of outmost importance. This is of outmost urgency especially this time wherein the Coronavirus pandemic still has no solution in sight. The long-term impact of our initiative is the improvement of health and well-being of local citizens by their own efforts.
