The devastation wrought by the two killer storms, “Ondoy” and Pepeng,” during the past two weeks can easily rank them as the most disruptive calamities ever to hit the country in 40 years.

The cost in human lives, infrastructure damage and crop losses have been staggering. More than 300 people were killed in landslides and flooding in Metro Manila, Central Luzon and Northern Luzon, including Benguet, La Union, Mountain Province, particularly Baguio City. According to the National Disaster Coordinating Council, the number of families dislocated by the two storms has increased to 829,498 families or 4 million people. Government officials estimate the total damage at P5 billion, including P3.9 billion in agricultural losses.

The storms unmasked the appalling inadequacy of the government services in providing relief to the stricken population and in evacuating people from flooded areas. They also underscored the government’s unpreparedness to cope with such a scale of human calamity.

Calamities of such magnitude have consequences that span the passage of governments now in transition, since the disaster took place as the sitting administration ends its term in June 2010. The deluge struck as the country faced a general election. The onus of the massive failure of the disaster relief infrastructure of the government has fallen heavily on the Arroyo administration—a criticism it richly deserves, although it claims that the country received an extraordinary volume of rainfall in the week of Sept. 26-30 and it has sought convenient refuge behind the explanation that most of the blame should be laid on the effects of climate change.

The next government inherits the huge task of rebuilding the damaged public works, the restoration of broken dams and irrigation units, and producing food in flooded fields, and resettling families who have lost their homes to safer localities. The rehabilitation and rebuilding of the devastated assets will take much longer than the remaining months of the incumbent administration.

In an assessment of the financial costs of rehabilitation, Sen. Edgardo Angara, chair of the Senate finance committee, said the rebuilding of public buildings, roads and irrigation destroyed by the two storms would require “more resources than we have now.” The country may need at least P30 billion to rehabilitate the damage, in addition to the P1.45 trillion proposed national budget for 2010, he said. About P40 billion might be needed for the long-term rehabilitation of devastated areas.

Angara said he believed the government had enough resources for the “immediate and urgent” relief of the typhoon victims. The government could source this relief fund from the proposed P10-billion supplemental budget, the P11-billion emergency lending facility of the Social Security System, the Government Service Insurance System and Pag-IBIG Fund, and the P5-billion assistance from foreign nations.

In the wake of frantic efforts to resettle dislocated victims, the World Bank, which works with governments in the resettlement of disaster victims, warned against returning them to areas vulnerable to recurring disasters. “We have found that reconstruction starts on day one,” said Abhas Jha, disaster risk management coordinator for the World Bank’s East Asia and Pacific region. “The biggest task is that bad decisions can get locked in early on.”

“If people are living in an unsafe area and their houses are destroyed, for example, it is important to make sure that they rebuild their homes in less vulnerable places,” he said. “No one can control natural hazards like storms and earthquakes, but a well-planned reconstruction can prevent people from living in the flood plain for building houses that are unsafe. We are not just responding to disaster, we are also working with communities and governments to ensure that lives and livelihoods are better protected in case of another disaster.”

Apart from declaring a state of national calamity, the government was forced by the flooding to start this month the purchase of 250,000 metric tons of rice for next year after the storms lashed rice lands across Central and Northern Luzon. The storms damaged 559,629 metric tons of palay (unmilled rice) in 365,000 hectares of farm lands.

The Department of Agriculture assured that there was sufficient rice stock to last for the rest of the year. It said the country only harvested 5.57 million MT of rice in the fourth quarter of 2009 (nearly 10 percent off the target of 6.4 million MT). But Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap said that “even if we don’t harvest this quarter, we have two months worth of stock. And since we still harvest, that’s good enough for another 104 days.”

The National Food Authority said the country had 2,278 million MT or rice, enough for 62 days’ consumption.

The biggest rice importer in the world, the Philippines has so far imported 1.775 million MT this year, down from the record 2.3 million MT imported last year. The additional rice will be imported from Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, Australia, United States and India. The rice shipments are scheduled to arrive in January until April next year.

The rice imports are short-term measures to avert rice shortages during the lean months of 2010 in the midst of an election next year. It does not help achieve the government’s policy of food security and rice self-sufficiency, an objective that has been set back by the storms.