Manila: The United Nations has launched a $65 million (Dh238 million) global appeal to help desperate survivors of a typhoon that killed hundreds of people and affected millions in the southern Philippines.
The death toll climbed above 700 with hundreds more missing, many of them tuna fishermen feared lost at sea, the government said on Tuesday.
Luiza Carvalho, country officer for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said on Monday that the funds would initially help provide food, water and emergency shelter to 480,000 people in the worst-hit areas.
Carvalho spent the past few days visiting Mindanao island, where landslides and floods from Typhoon Bopha flattened entire communities last week, laying low the banana and mining industries.
“I was shocked by the destruction I saw,” she told a news conference in Davao city on the edge of the disaster zone.
“Areas which have been completely devastated, with only a few damaged buildings still standing. Debris from houses, buildings, landslides and logs. Entire plantations wiped out.”
She said the typhoon, the strongest to hit the region for more than 80 years, had left its many poor residents without the means to feed their families.
“This devastation cannot be erased overnight,” she added.
Over the longer term, the UN aid programme will help survivors to recover emotionally and rebuild the devastated farm sector, Carvalho said.
A third of the country’s banana harvest was wiped out, leaving tens of thousands of plantation workers without an immediate source of income, according to industry officials.
The civil defence office in Manila said 647 bodies had so far been recovered.
A total of 890 people remain missing, but officials have said some of them could be among the 257 corpses that have been retrieved by rescuers but remain unidentified and unclaimed by relatives.
Civil defence chief Benito Ramos has said some of those listed as missing could be among more than 200 unidentified bodies, many of them bloated beyond recognition, that have not been claimed by relatives.
More than 400 bodies have been turned over to relatives, and the government is considering interring the rest in mass graves if nobody claims them within 48 hours.
At least 5.4 million people were affected by the typhoon, the civil defence office said.
In Manila, President Benigno Aquino’s spokesman Edwin Lacierda appealed to the private sector to provide helicopters to fly relief goods to areas cut off by ruined roads and fallen trees.
He said that aside from food, temporary housing and dry clothes were needed.
“The important thing is shelter, because they don’t have a roof over their heads,” Lacierda told reporters.
In the storm-ravaged town of Cateel, coconut farmer Marites Ybanez, 46, said she needed shelter, food and any help she could get after her home and livelihood were destroyed.
Bopha ripped off the second floor of her house, exposing her family of 10 to the elements even as it flattened their small coconut farm.
“We are short of everything, food, medicine, temporary shelter, our houses are destroyed. When it rains, we get soaked. We really need tents,” she said, near tears.
While the local government provided some rice, canned fish and instant noodles, it was not enough, Ybanez said. Now, she and her 73-year-old sick mother could only huddle in the ruins of their home, waiting for donations.
The typhoon destroyed 81,000 houses, and more than 300,000 survivors face months sheltering in crowded government gyms and schools as officials look for safe places to build new homes.
Relief workers have reported looting of shops in at least one hard-hit town on Mindanao’s east coast. Homeless people without a space in government shelters have been reduced to begging on roadsides.
Farmers in Mindanao, the centre of UN’s livelihood assistance, “have seen their crops devastated… thousands are now completely unable to provide for their families,” said the UN statement.
Assessing local government officials displaced and affected residents in hard hit areas such as Davao Oriental and Compostela Valley, Carvalho said, “I am profoundly moved by the Filipino people and their determination to help each other during this time.”
With inputs from agencies
