As Typhoon Egay battered Northern Luzon and affected other areas of the country, Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Secretary Rex Gatchalian on Friday announced the agency’s new disaster preparedness program called “Buong Bansa Handa.”

Gatchalian said the DSWD has formulated the new program based on President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.’s directive to come up “with fail-safe mechanisms for our supply chains.”

“The goal there is to be omnipresent, so to speak,” Gatchalian said during the 2023 post-SONA discussion on Environmental Protection and Disaster Management at the Hilton Manila in Pasay City.

Through the new disaster program, Gatchalian said citizens will “feel that the government is there, in fact, ahead, during, and right after a storm or a natural calamity.”

The Buong Bansa Handa will tap two supply chains to deliver the basic food and non-food requirements of disaster victims.

The first supply chain will feature an expanded network of warehouse facilities of local government units (LGUs), provincial governments, and other national government agencies, while the other one will be private-sector driven.

Gatchalian said the DSWD will procure the services of private sector partners in the food distribution business through framework agreements or supply agreements to complement the government-driven supply chain line.

Through this system, the DSWD will be able to “make sure that government relief efforts or government relief packs are spread across the entire country,” he said.

The DSWD currently has over 1.3 million family food packs (FFPs) spread across the country that can be immediately distributed to local government units (LGUs) affected by Egay.

In a Facebook post, Gatchalian assured the public that the DSWD has sufficient funds to augment the resources of LGUs affected by Egay and the southwest monsoon or habagat.

He said upon the instruction of President Marcos, he ordered all DSWD Field Office (FO) regional directors to be on alert and to monitor the situation in their respective regions and identify the immediate needs of typhoon-affected families.

Gatchalian convened an online disaster operations coordination meeting with regional directors from Ilocos and Cagayan Valley, Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) and Mimorapa to check on the status of disaster response operations in the four regions relative to the effects of the typhoon. (PNA)