Guest Post: Tonga – an overview

A guest post by a reader:

Tonga has a population of about 100k. So there are probably 25-30 trashed dwellings. 

I won’t even try to think about how to provide drinking water for however long it takes to rebuild roofs and stuff. 100k people at 10l/day each is 1m litres/day …. Only until we rebuild houses of course. God knows where that comes from.

Food wise I understand there are a lot of subsistence farmers. There are also people who grow cash crops like vanilla for export. All of the crops have been trashed by ash and will probably not be back up for another 12 months.  Tourism of course will be trashed for 6-12 months.

Sanitation will be a problem – with toilets all trashed there is lots of scope for disease … think Haiti and cholera.

Also Tonga has $150m or so of debt to China … 

The royals who own the satellite slots should be relatively unaffected ….

The odd shipload/planeload of aid is all good stuff, but the big picture is pretty depressing. Charity is admirable, but this is huge. How much of it is our(NZ)problem?