THE Philippine Red Cross (PRC) is set to revisit the municipality of Baggao in Cagayan Province to grant agricultural and livelihood assistance to 493 families affected by the destruction brought by Typhoon Mangkhut (Ompong).

PRC will return to Cagayan on June 14 to lead the distribution of up to P10,000 household livelihood assistance to 436 families and P15,000 household agricultural assistance to 57 families from Baggao, where Mangkhut made landfall in September 2018.

“We continue to live by our motto—when the world no longer watches, we do what must be done. The Red Cross does not settle for providing the needs of the people. We aim to transform lives. This is why we want to enable them to start anew,” PRC Chairman Richard Gordon said.

Cagayan Province is the worst hit by Typhoon Ompong. Data from the PRC Operations Center show 132,074 houses were fully or partially damaged—with over 15,912 individuals displaced during the onslaught of the typhoon.

The province also suffered at least P4.4 billion in agricultural damages as 100 percent of corn crops and 64 percent of rice products were lost.

“When we visited Baggao last year, we witnessed how devastated the people were. We saw houses with blown roofs and damaged crops. This motivated us to continue working on the situation,” he added.

In partnership with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the recovery program targets farmers with less than one hectare of cultivable land, as well as farm laborers and households who belong under the social vulnerability criteria.

For the first installment of the program, PRC will provide P6,000 to livelihood grantees and P8,000 for the agricultural beneficiaries. The full amount will be given once the monitoring is completed.

Last September, Gordon led the distribution of CGI sheets and shelter toolkits to 393 households from Baggao and basic household items to 355 families from Gattaran.

Since then, PRC has provided as much as P15,000-livelihood assistance to 893 families in Cagayan and as much as P54,000 cash assistance to 181 families whose houses were fully damaged.