Tsunami Six-Month Anniversary: New Oxfam Report Shows Poorest Suffered Most

Poor people
suffered the most as a result of the tsunami and need to be supported
further during the reconstruction phase, says a new report released
today (Saturday) by international agency Oxfam.

New survey
data shows that in one village in Sri Lanka, villagers who lost
their homes suffered an average 94% drop in income from $1 (Cdn)
per head of household per day to 4 cents per day. This is due
in part to the inaccessibility of poor people, the report maintains.
The poor are often isolated and harder to reach through existing
structures.

The report,
"Targeting Poor People," published on the eve of the
tsunami's six-month anniversary shows that the impact on the poor
was compounded by three factors:

1. Pre-existing
vulnerability:

• Fragile
  houses were washed away while the brick houses of those better
  off were more likely to withstand the force of the wave; and
• Poor villages
  in remote areas received help later and lacked medical services.2.

2. Geographical
coincidence:

• The tsunami
  affected regions of the three worst hit countries where some
  of the poorest people reside.

3. Aid priorities:

• Though
  the reconstruction effort in many cases is effectively helping
  poor people, in some cases aid has focused on landowners, business
  people and the most high profile cases, rather than poor communities.

"Poor
people suffered the most from the tsunami and face the greatest
challenges," said Rieky Stuart, executive director of Oxfam
Canada. "Fortunately, the generous response of the public
allows us to address those challenges effectively. We aid agencies
must use this opportunity to help people work their way out of
poverty and to ensure they are better placed to deal with natural
disasters if and when they strike again."

Oxfam's
Relief and Reconstruction
Oxfam and partners are working to help over one million people
affected by the tsunami in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. The
overall relief effort has been a great success, stopping the outbreak
of disease and providing people with basics such as shelter and
water. Oxfam is now increasing its focus on women and marginalized
groups to ensure no one is left out of the aid effort.

For example, in India Oxfam is helping to rebuild salt-pans that
provide work for thousands of poor labourers, some of whom are
from Dalit communities. Those working on the salt-pans are extremely
poor and marginalized. But because their houses were not destroyed
their needs were not given official priority.

In Sri Lanka
much government aid has been targeted at registered businesses.
This means that, for example, the owners of coir (coconut fibre)
mills are being compensated for damage but the poor coir workers
who struggle to make a living will not benefit. In India there
has been a tendency to concentrate help on sea fishermen but other
workers, such as labourers, small farmers and salt-pan workers
(many of whom are women or from lower castes) have received less
help.

The provision
of housing for poor people also presents difficulties. Before
the tsunami, many of the most marginalized people were not landowners.
Even those who had land now often find themselves unable to prove
it as they have lost the official documents or because land rights
formerly rested with men (where women are now the heads of households).

Without a
land title, these families risk being dispossessed of their land.
In Indonesia, where the tsunami displaced up to 500,000 people,
better-off families have already been able to leave the camps,
but thousands of poor people remain.

"Desperately
poor people have been made poorer still by the tsunami. The aid
effort must now increase its emphasis on helping poor people,
marginalized groups and women to ensure they are not excluded
from reconstruction efforts," Ms. Stuart added.

Oxfam recommends
that governments and international agencies proactively seek to
address the particular needs of the poorest people affected by
the Tsunami. This is vital if these countries are to work towards
achieving the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals
of halving global poverty by 2015.

Even before
the tsunami the region was poor:

• In Aceh
  (Indonesia) years of armed conflict had already reduced prosperity.
  In 2002 half of the population had no access to clean water
  and nearly a third lived in poverty.
• In India,
  the southern coastal states worst hit, Kerala and Tamil Nadu,
  were relatively wealthy but the people of the coastal communities
  are some of the poorest in the whole country. In each of the
  three most affected districts (Nagapattinam, Cuddalore, and
  Kannaykumari) the average person lives on less than $1 per day.
• In Sri
  Lanka up to one-third of the population in the areas affected
  by the tsunami live below the poverty line, more in the conflict-torn
  North and East.

Read
the report (pdf document)

Note to Editors
Field interviews, video news release material, and pictures are
available.
For reports on Oxfam relief and reconstruction activities, visit
www.oxfam.ca.

For more information, please contact:
Mark Fried
613-850-9723