The World Food Program (WFP) has ordered a large amount of processed foods from a local snack producer UNIBIS for urgent delivery, Indonesia's UNIBIS owner-manager Yanuar Riwan told Xinhua News Agency on Sunday.

"Foods, ready-to-eat foods in particular, are the most needed item for the Nias quake survivors," he added. "To show their sympathy, the 1,400 workers are nowadays putting in extra hours and efforts to fulfill the order."

UNIBIS, the largest biscuits-snack manufacturer of Sumatra, supplied emergency foods to the tsunami victim in Aceh in the past months. This time it contributed 2.5 tons of foods as gift to Nias shortly after the quake, he added.

Riwan said the WFP directs foods made for surviving children should be given special treatment. "And accordingly, UNIBIS has added a new ingredient -- vitamin to the biscuits."

He said some 12,000 tons of vitamin-added biscuits would be made from April to June for WFP to be sent to Nias and Aceh.

Meanwhile, information from Nias shows food has become the biggest challenge for the residents after the stabilization of the medical situation. However, with the connection of half of the island's 22 subdistricts by a repaired road system, government and international emergency foods have started to reach them, especially those in the deep south where there is little to eat for days and rice prices are shooting up by 50 percent.

The food issue is the most serious with children. Milly Mildawati, a volunteer with the Nias Children Protection Center, said nearly 100 kids, especially orphans or those who have broken families, were almost overwhelmed by starvation immediately after the quake.

Thanks to the emergency foods such as the nutritious WFP biscuits, the children have now recovered well, she told Xinhua.

Nias was the epicenter of the great quake on March 28 that killed more than 600, wounded several thousands and left many more thousands homeless.
 
(Xinhua News Agency April 11, 2005)