Trevor Rowe Quotations

Unless the international community renews its commitment to deal with the consequences of the food crisis in Niger, including the prevailing level of malnutrition, the country faces a second year of extreme suffering and hardship.

Usually 10 days into a crisis like this, we don't feel this vulnerable. But right now we're really concerned.

One of the big problems we have is every time we have a crisis, we have to go knocking on doors. It could take anywhere from two to four months from the time we get the money to the actual handing over of the food because you have to buy it, transport it, and distribute it. There's a delay in that.

Those are life-and-death situations. What we're also concerned about is helping people who do not face that sort of thing. We need to help them become self-sufficient and produce food to feed themselves.

The fact that the tsunami struck a tourist region, and happened right after Christmas, played a role in terms of the generosity. We haven't witnessed that yet with the earthquake. Not at all. We need all the help we can get.

This represents the opportunity to tap into the financial markets and transfer some of the risk involved to the financial markets which will assume it and give us a better opportunity to respond. There's the possibility of using this more imaginatively down the road.

We don't see any of it now. We've been waiting and appealing and it is not coming in.

There's so much demand, and it's clearly the result of a sharp increase in the number of natural disasters.

The world has been caught unprepared for this.

This gives you an indicator at the time of planting, or soon thereafter. The enormous advantage of this is that it allows us to begin preparing and responding much earlier in the game than if we wait to see what kind of harvest we're going to have.

The rest are silent emergencies grinding poverty and chronic hunger that doesn't get seen on TV, ... And their needs tend to go unmet.

If you're in the insurance industry, you want to be able to diversify your portfolio because that spreads your risk.