From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Thu Sep 18 2008 - 12:56:10 EDT
Aid system at crisis point, agency says
18 Sep 2008 15:34:00 GMT
Written by: Ruth Gidley
[image: Men share a midday meal at Kerfi, a site for displaced Chadians
some 50 km (30 miles) south of the eastern town of Gos Beida, June 2008.
<BR/>REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly]
Men share a midday meal at Kerfi, a site for displaced Chadians some 50 km
(30 miles) south of the eastern town of Gos Beida, June 2008.
REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly
Overhaul the global relief system now or watch millions more people slide
over the edge into destitution, an aid agency says in a report full of
warnings to donors, governments and humanitarians alike.
As rocketing food and fuel prices force more people to resort to begging and
more children to give up school to work, CARE International says it would be
better - and much cheaper - to act now than to try to wade in later with
inefficient life-saving aid.
"We've got a choice what to do. Wait until people need emergency response -
and that's extremely expensive - or look at new ways of supporting people to
feed themselves," says Vanessa Rubin, who co-wrote CARE's report.
The global food crisis has tipped 100 million people into destitution in the
last two years, CARE says. And the forecast for the near future is dire.
"The price of food and fuel have shot up - that's not going to change,"
Rubin says. "We're seeing more and more sudden emergencies - and with
climate change that's only going to get worse. And in some of the countries
we're talking about, we're seeing population growth accelerating at an
alarming rate.
"Those three things are going to push more people over the edge to the point
where they can't meet their needs."
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation has just calculated that 75
million more people were added to the ranks of the world's hungry in 2007,
taking the global figure to roughly 925 million.
CARE's report quotes a 9-year-old Ethiopian boy, Mohammed, who says families
he knows in the capital Addis Ababa are eating in shifts, the oldest on
Monday, the second on Tuesday, the third on Wednesday. "If he's lucky there
is something for the eldest to eat on Wednesday morning or evening again."
The report recommends a new global fund to deal with the crisis. The fund
would involve the United Nations, multilateral organisations, local
government, aid agencies, civil society, the private sector and
beneficiaries, the agency envisions.
CARE doesn't say how much the fund would need, but British-based aid agency
Oxfam estimated in a June report that it would take $14.5 bn to meet the
needs of people affected by the food crisis now.
However Rubin says it's not just about more aid, but about the kind of aid.
CARE's report says relief at the moment is too short-term and too focused on
responding when an emergency is in full swing instead of protecting the ways
people make a living.
This year, as a food emergency in drought-prone Ethiopia stares donors in
the face, many are splashing cash around to save lives. And yet, CARE says
that just months earlier some of the same donors turned down its requests
for funding to avoid a food crisis in the Horn of Africa.
In Niger, too, three years after the country's worst food emergency for
decades, CARE says almost 20 percent of the population is again facing
hunger as drought and flooding wipe out their dwindling food stocks.
"Instead of just waiting until an emergency reaches its peak, people need
long-term, predictable aid so agencies can identify the people who are most
vulnerable and help them become more resilient," Rubin says.
CARE says governments all round the world should be putting safety nets in
place to help their populations avoid slipping over the edge, and relief
agencies need an urgent shake-up too.
"We need to find clever and different ways to use limited resources to
change things," she says.
CARE calls for aid agencies to turn down monetised food aid from the U.S.
government - food aid sold to raise cash for poverty-raising programmes.
CARE made a dramatic turnaround on this issue several years ago when it
began arguing that the U.S. system was inefficient, wasted half of every
dollar spent on shipping food across the world, and undermined local markets
by competing with local farmers' crops.
Humanitarians also need to get to grips with the reality that many of the
people most at risk today are urban poor, and shift their thinking
accordingly.
And they should be helping pastoralists to retain their way of life in a
changing world. The traditional herding that sustains many people across
Africa is viable, CARE says, but many communities could do with a lot more
support accessing credit or veterinary expertise or setting up fodder banks
to tide them through hard times.
The world's wealthy countries are already falling far short of their pledges
under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) - approved in 2000 by U.N.
member states and the world's top development organisations - to boost
development aid and slash poverty by 2015.
By then, CARE estimates, nearly $200 billion will have been spent fighting
emergencies, if we carry on with the status quo.
A meeting in New York on Sept. 25 to review progress on the MDGS will
confirm everyone is failing to meet their targets.
And unless they make headway with the first goal - halving hunger - CARE
says it will be impossible to achieve the rest, such as gender equality and
education.
"Doing nothing," Rubin says, "is not an option."
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