Jim Adams's blog

Two massive natural disasters in two East Asian countries – Myanmar and China – over the past five weeks have brought home just how quickly and dramatically life and livelihoods can be destroyed. Our experts in natural disaster recovery and reconstruction know this only too well. These are people who specialize in assessing the extent of damage that a cyclone, an earthquake or a tsunami can wreak and what to do to get the basics of life back up and running.

Some of these people – including water resources and transport infrastructure reconstruction experts, environmental damage assessment specialists and social services and livelihood restoration experts – have honed their skills over a number of years in Aceh, Pakistan, Turkey, India and elsewhere. A group of them have been in Beijing over the past two weeks preparing for a workshop for the key Chinese Government ministries involved in the huge recovery and reconstruction effort following the Sichuan earthquake. At the same time, we are working to assist a damage and loss assessment in Myanmar that’s being undertaken by a team made up of staff from the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Government of Myanmar, UN agencies and the World Bank.

I see there has been some blog chatter about the World Bank's position on Thailand's rice exports. Let me take the chance here to set the record straight: Thailand is a great international trading partner, it's commited to maintaining its rice exports, and we support this action. This is very important at this time of food price hikes and it's the responsible thing to do.

(The chatter --see some examples here and here-- started with a Bloomberg story  published yesterday).