Emergency Appeal: COVID19 launched today

5 May , 2020 Our News

Plant Your Future has launched its first ever emergency appeal as part of #GivingTuesdayNow — a global day of unity on May 5th in response to Coronavirus.

Peru is in complete lockdown, strictly enforced by the military, for our farmers, this means no income and no food.

With no savings, families live day-to-day, and have no stocks of food to rely on. If they get sick, they cannot go to hospital because the health system is already at the point of collapse and they can’t afford to pay the medical expenses.


How You Can Help

With a donation of just £35 you can enable us to deliver a family a food parcel with essential rations that will feed them for 10 days. Or by donating £100, you can provide enough food to feed a family for an entire month. You can also fund delivering an emergency medical kit — paracetamol, rehydration fluids and hand sanitiser for the family — for just £10.


Peru’s COVID-19 Crisis

COVID-19 has hit the Peruvian Amazon badly. Iquitos, the nearest city in Loreto, has become a hotspot for the disease. The health system is at the point of collapse – turning people away, they have run out of oxygen and the morgues are full.

The farmers we work with in rural areas have no access to food, other than what they grow on their land. They’re used to going to town to buy key food supplies and selling their produce at market to generate income.
But for over 40 days they’ve not been allowed to leave their villages so they’re slipping into food poverty.

The government doesn’t have the systems or resources in place to deliver food aid – least of all to rural areas. And one of the reasons Peru has enforced such a strict lockdown is that they’re very ill prepared to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, due to a poor national health infrastructure and extremely limited PPE, ventilators and oxygen.

As our farmers already live on or below the poverty line, they have limited reserves to cope with the economic consequences of this crisis. They are extremely vulnerable.


Taking Action Now

Our Peruvian team has been working tirelessly these last few weeks to supply emergency food parcels and basic medical supplies to communities in Loreto and Ucayali, the Amazon regions where we work in Peru. But we need to raise more funds to continue this critical work. Families have no access to food and so they’re facing malnutrition and starvation. Without emergency food packages, they’ll be forced to risk arrest by going to markets to sell and buy produce. Food markets have become the epicentre of COVID-19 contagion, so they’d be risking their lives. But when your children are hungry, what choice do you have?

We need to keep our families safe by making it possible for them to stay at home.

Please donate today and support one of our families during this desperate time — we are so grateful for your generous support.

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