On the security issue

UNICEF Geoffrey Keele Spokesperson

UNICEF is currently working throughout the country assessing the state of Iraq's hospitals, schools, and vital water and sanitation infrastructure, as well as meeting the most immediate and urgent needs of the people of the country.

In the south, UNICEF has funded 30 Assessment teams to investigate the water situation in the southern governorates. While testing for water quality in Basra City, the assessment teams were shocked to find that at one third of the sites they visited they could not test for water quality, because there was no water at all.

The reason for this was simple. People continue to either pound or shoot holes into the water distribution pipes to steal the water that comes gushing out. As the water gushes out, it reduces the water pressure and further down the line there is no water at all.

This is having two very major impacts. Firstly, people in need simply can not access water because of the looters. In one case, the pipes feeding into the Basra General Hospital have been punctured so many times further up the line that by the time the pipes reach the hospital, there is nothing left. The hospital has only a two day supply of water left before it completely runs out.

In another case, a pipe that is laying under a pool of stagnant water has been intentionally punctured to get at the fresh water. Now, children and women are wadding through the pools of stagnant water to fetch clean water, and the dirty water is leaking into the pipe, contaminating it for those further down the distribution chain.

This is has obvious health risks for the people of Basra, and when I visited there last week all of the pediatric hospitals I visited told UNICEF about the steep rise in diarrheal disease they were seeing.

To assist with this situation, UNICEF is sending water tankers to the hospital to ensure that their merger supplies do not run out. We are also assessing the main water distribution network so that we can undertake repairs. The problem is that these repairs need to be accompanied by security, and that is something UNICEF can not provide. That is the responsibility of the coalition forces and it is a job that needs doing now.

UNICEF will also be conducting countrywide assessments of Iraq's school to get a clearer picture of the state of the country's post-war education system. UNICEF will start by assessing 4,000 school in the five southern governorates this week.

In Baghdad, UNICEF is currently delivering "School in a Box" kits to schools around the city. In fact today we delivered enough school supplies for 4,800 children to Zafarania. UNICEF also delivered High Protein Biscuits (HPB) and Oral Re-hydration Salts (ORS) to hospitals in the same neighbourhood.

Antonia Paradela Spokesperson World Food Programme

WFP's Executive Director will be giving an address today to the Security Council. These are background notes about WFP activities in Iraq.

WFP and Iraq

WFP's main task is to support the Public Distribution System (PDS), that before the war used to distribute food rations to the whole Iraqi population through a network of 44,000 food and flour agents. The PDS belongs to the Ministry of Trade. Most of the food distributed by the PDS came into the country as part of the Oil for Food programme. The amount distributed each month was about 480,000 tons of food.

WFP will also focus on vulnerable groups such as internally displaced people, malnourished children, hospitals, orphanages, etc.

The daily adult ration distributed through the Public Distribution System includes 300g of wheat flour, 100g rice, 50g pulses, 25g vegetable oil, 5g salt and 33 g of dried whole milk ? a daily energy value of 2,280 kcal and 56g protein.

On a monthly basis that means: 9 kg of wheat flour, 3kg of rice, 1.5 kg of pulses, 1.5 kg vegetable oil, 2 kg of sugar, 0.2 kg tea, 1 kg dried whole milk, also salt, detergent, soap, and baby formula for infants.

The food and flour agents, normally shopkeepers, come and pick up their allocations once a month and they distribute it to the families in their neighbourhood or village. They charge for each person per month 250 dinars (about the price of a piece of bread) for the whole ration food basket. The families come with their ration card once a month to pick up their food. The system reaches the whole Iraqi population.

It is estimated that before the war the food ration was the only source of income for about 16 million Iraqis. They would sell part of the food to obtain other urgent needs.

Iraqis received extra rations since last summer from the government. This means most of the people have food (or at least key elements such as wheat flour) to last into June.

Food dispatched into Iraq by WFP since the beginning of April till May 21st : about 264.000 tons = enough to feed the whole Iraqi population (27.1 million) for 15 days or half of the Iraqi population for a whole month.