Brussels - The European Union is to donate 1.5 million euros (2.2 million dollars) in aid to victims of Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh, officials in Brussels said on Friday. The aid is intended to provide front-line support to those most urgently in need. The most pressing demands in Bangladesh are for food, drinking water, shelter, clothes, blankets and medicine, a spokesman for the EU executive, the Commission, said.
EU experts already on the ground report a picture of devastation, with up to 80 per cent of homes in the worst-hit areas flattened, hundreds of thousands of people left without shelter, food and water, and crops ravaged just before the harvest, the spokesman said.
Cyclone Sidr hit the coast of Bangladesh late on Thursday with winds of over 200 kilometres an hour. By early Friday, over 220 people were reported dead, with thousands more missing.
EU aid officials have repeatedly warned that climate-related disasters are on the rise. In the last three months alone, the EU has sent emergency aid to storm and flood victims in Central and South America, the Caribbean, East Africa and South-East Asia.
