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Lessons from HaitiThe World Food Program calls its response to the January 12 earthquake the most complex operation it has ever launched. Haiti presented a unique problem because of where it is situated – the quake hit the busiest area of an isolated island that’s heavily populated. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong, said Lou Policastro, executive vice president of Geodis Wilson, the company that manages the WFPs logistics, in an article on the Journal of Commerce website. When WFP got the call to start mobilizing, nothing was open, because it happened to be the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. WFP started mobilizing all of the truck capacity it could get to provide ready-to-eat meals onto pallets from several states. All told, the WFP delivered nearly 3 million meals in the first days after the quake, says the article, enough to feed the population of Port-au-Prince for one day. The global recession hasn’t helped, because there are now fewer resources for getting to Haiti via airlines or shipping. The article calls Haiti “the latest of a string of disasters worldwide that have challenged relief supply chains.” Haiti lacked both government preparation and the community resources to meet the population’s most urgent needs in the first critical days after the earthquake, said Lynn Fritz of the Fritz Institute, a San Francisco-based nonprofits humanitarian logistics organization. “It takes time for large, mass support to come in under the best of circumstances,” Fritz said. To read the article, please click here:
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