Minimum food will be delivered as part of lockdown exercise

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The Livelihood Committee which is one of the key groups that will engage in the 36-hour lockdown will be delivering a small amount of food on request as part of its lockdown exercise.

Director of the Committee and Deputy Secretary Technical of Ministry of Agriculture Michael Ho’ota said they will be transporting food to only a certain location on request as part of their lockdown drill.

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He said there are only minimum packages of food and once those are delivered and supply runs out then it also ends their delivery. The food supply is funded under the $1.8m, which is the budget for the lockdown.

Ho’ota encourages the public to stoke up their food supply for the 36 hours’ lockdown.

He said given the limited resources at the government’s disposal it can only do little.

Ho’ota recalled that based on experience in the past two lockdowns –there was stress for resources especially food after 24 hours by certain families.

He revealed that they had only responded to serious cases with the delivery of food and water.

Ho’ota admitted that they were also mindful that there were some people who just wanted to use the situation to get free food.

The livelihood delivered packages— that is estimated for a family of five – consist of rice, cassava, kumara and potato.

For this lockdown, he said, they would increase the packets to around 200 as they had delivered more than a 100 in the past lockdowns.

Ho’ota recalled that there were fewer calls in the early hours and they delivered food to pre-arranged communities but as the time went on more people called but they ran out of food.

Ho’ota said such information is helpful for this lockdown but once food supply runs out then they’ll stop.

The number to call is 28116 for those seeking food assistance during the lockdown.

Meanwhile the Livelihood Committee has also had in place its long term plans incase there is a community transmission of COVID-19 and how it will deal with food and shops in the city.

News@SBMOnline2020